


S-O-S

by alpha_hydra



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: AKA the rivals AU I was looking for for an eternity but couldn't find and had to write my damn self, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Frenemies, M/M, aka rivals au, and then fake rivals, gratuitous use of Otabek's sisters to knock some sense into hiim, literally everyone shows up but i can't be bothered to tag them all, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-02-10 17:47:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12917043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpha_hydra/pseuds/alpha_hydra
Summary: There is not a lot that Otabek is afraid of, normally.Things Otabek is afraid of, a list written in his head that will never see the light of day:1) Spiders2) Falling off a tall building3) Yuri Plisetsky seeing Otabek’s terrible axel and telling him he’s not good enough againAKA Otabek sees a boy who is effortless in a ballet studio and he burns with jealousy. It's not the best start to his skating career (or the turbulent whirlwind that would become his love life), but it's a start.





	1. Glad (he never fell in love with me)

**Author's Note:**

> This is about 75% written. I'll try to post somewhat consistently, but anyone who has followed me before knows those are the most well-meant lies. Anyway, Otabek is a year younger in this story because I had a few timeline fails, so they are 10/12 at the start. Will probably follow these two kiddos into early twenties, which is when you realize you're an adult and also a garbage pile of an adult and whoever said being twenty-something meant you were an adult was LYING TO YOU.

Glad (he never fell in love with me)

I.

It's just after lunch on Otabek's second week at Yakov's summer camp, and he hates it with a burning passion. Otabek’s been put with the juniors even though he's turning 12 in October. He’s at the age where he could choose to stay with the younger kids, or be moved up to the more advanced level of training. The choice, however, was made without him. He still pictures the way Lillia Ivanovna Baranovskaya's eyes scanned the crowd of boys, how she'd frowned at Otabek's less than stellar improvement. The next day, he had to start listening to Yakov  
Feltsman barking orders to kids three years younger than him. He still hasn't gotten over how awful it is.

Still hasn't gotten over how some of these kids who just barely hit the double digits are more flexible than him.

He watches a boy who's got eyes like a soldier as he brings his leg up into an arabesque, watches the way he frowns for a moment before the look morphs back into an impassive stare and his foot raises a few centimeters higher. Otabek has never been more jealous of a child.

Otabek is eleven and absolutely hates life. He will, at this moment in time, give up life and limb to get out of his ballet lessons. But he’s only in Russia because his parents actually believed him when he said he was going to be a world class skater, and they’ve already paid for his room and board and Yakov’s summer camp for beginners. He can’t just give up. 

And yet. 

Yet here he is, struggling through a terrible arabesque with nine year olds. He doesn't think he'll ever get Yakov’s grim stare out of his brain, when the man had glanced over his form and said “beginners ballet. Lillia Baranovskaya will never see him until he learns how to turn out properly.”

The music ends, and their tutor says something about the end of class. After that hour of pure torture, Otabek is finally allowed to turn tail and run. And ok, yes, maybe he pulls off his ballet shoes with so much force he's afraid he’ll rip the tough canvas fabric, and maybe when he throws his bag over his shoulder he maybe beans the kid next to him, but he's upset, and angry, and all he really wants to do with his life is curl up on his borrowed bed with his stuffed teddy bear and wish the summer away. 

“Hey jerk, what the hell is your problem?” the kid snaps when Otabek is already halfway to the door. 

Otabek turns sharply, and a tiny kid with bright green eyes is scowling at him and rubbing a hand over his head. He stares some more, and realizes it was the kid with the picture perfect arabesque, the one that turned Otabek green with envy when he first laid eyes on it.

Wonderful.

“I didn't know they let kids swear like that,” Otabek replies because he is annoyed and can’t actually believe his bad luck. 

At that, the kid’s jaw drops with something like surprise on his face, there and gone in the blink of an eye.

“Screw you!” he shouts so loudly that everyone else in the room quiets and turns to them. 

And then the kid shoulder checks him so hard Otabek almost loses his balance, and he’s gone. 

Later, Otabek finds out from his roommate that the kid's name is Yuri Plisetsky, and that he is nine despite being so much shorter than everyone in his class. 

“He's stronger than he looks, too,” Christopher, the skinny kid from Ireland says very seriously. “I wouldn't mess with him.”

“No kidding,” Otabek says, rubbing his arm absently over the spot where the boy, Yuri, had shoved past him. 

“Do you want to play something?” Christopher says after a long silence. 

“No,” Otabek says, in the precocious way of kids the world over. “I need to stretch.”

“Okay,” Christopher says easily, and that is that. 

He slips out of his bed easily and wanders out. The click of the door shutting is a quiet punctuation that leaves a chill in Otabek's bones, but he's not sure why. Otabek stares at the door for a very long time, long enough that shadows start to gather in the corners of the room, and his host parents call him and Christopher down for dinner. He doesn't stretch, and the next morning he suffers for it. Tonight, however, he thinks about Yuri Plisetsky, and his dark green eyes, and figures he may as well apologise tomorrow, if they happen to share their ice skating class. If not, he'll have to wait until ballet again on Thursday, and the kid probably won't even remember Otabek by then. 

*

Otabek does, in fact, have Yuri for his ice skating class, although it's split up in such a way that he never really sees half of the kids until they're all pulling sweats over their tights and switching skates for their street shoes. 

“Hey jerk!” a voice shouts across the locker room. The whole place goes deadly silent, and when Otabek scans the room, he sees tiny Yuri Plisetsky marching towards him, glaring. “Are you just gonna leave today like you did yesterday?”

“You left me yesterday,” Otabek says before he can process his own answer. 

It only seems to annoy Yuri more. He turns an interesting shade of red and stabs Otabek in the shoulder with his bony finger. 

“You're the one who hit me with his stupid bag,” Yuri says. 

“You swear a lot for a kid still in his single digits,” Otabek says helplessly (because he wants to get beat up by a nine year old, apparently). 

Yuri narrows his eyes and pulls away from Otabek's personal space, squinting and crossing his arms as he does so. 

“You don’t know anything,” Yuri scoffs. “As a matter of fact, I’m 10! I turned ten last month! And if you wanna go around making enemies, you should at least learn to pick your skates up when you jump,” Yuri says. “You'll never get more than a single rotation in like that. Why are you even here?”

That question pulls Otabek up short. He stares at Yuri, and he knows what he must look like: like he's seen a ghost or… or… or … well. something that pulls an awful, self satisfied smirk to Yuri’s face, by the looks of it.

“If you're not any good you should just go home,” Yuri says viciously, and then turns and sweeps out of the room.        

*

“How is camp going, Bekkatya?”

“Don’t call me that,” Otabek says into his phone later that night. 

He’s curled up by the foot of his bed, watching the shadows that pool on the other side of the room while listening to his older sister’s breathing over the phone. Beside him, Christopher snores gently; Otabek knows he should have probably gone to sleep by now. Even in Almaty it’s late, which is probably why Otabek called Kelebek instead of his parents, who no doubt are asleep by now. But Kelebek is at the age where she thinks she can outrun sleep, and she never misses a call from him. 

“Are you okay, Beka?” she asks now, her voice turned serious. 

“Yes, Beka,” Otabek dutifully replies, a reluctant smile creeping up his lips. 

People used to say that Kelebek and Otabek were twins born four years apart, for how similar they looked. Kelebek has been Otabek’s biggest champion since he first said he wanted to figure skate, and has been supportive even when she would much rather disappear off with her friends and do mysterious preteen things. Otabek loves her with a mix of awe and embarrassment, and sometimes he thinks that they might just have that special twin bond, with the way they can read each other’s silences. He thinks it now, when he hears Kelebek sigh all the way across the barren stretch of Russia. 

“What’s happened, Otabek?”

“Nothing,” he lies. 

“Uh huh,” Kelebek says skeptically. “That’s why the first time you call me since going to St. Petersburg is at 11 o’clock at night. You know what mom would say if she knows you’re up past your bedtime?”

“It’s past your bedtime too,” Otabek says, and isn’t ashamed at how it sounds like a whine. “Kelebek, what if I’m not any good at this?”

“At what?”

“Skating,” Otabek whispers, like he thinks maybe Christopher will wake up at any minute and make fun of him. “They put me in with the babies because I wasn’t good enough for Lillia Baranovskaya, they said, and lots of kids are already better than me. What if I’m just here wasting Mom and Dad’s money and when I get home they’ll all tell me that I can’t skate and to just do a regular person thing, like--like--like math or something, and-”

“Otabek,” Kelebek says sharply, and pulls Otabek out of a minor panic by the timbre of her voice. “Everybody starts at different places.”

“But there are so many people already better than me,” Otabek says. “There’s this nine year old kid who is probably the best person here, including all of the bigger kids, and he already told me I should just go home. And he’s just a kid.”

 _”You’re_ just a kid!” Kelebek exclaims. 

“Nuh uh!” Otabek argues. “I’m turning twelve in October, and Yuri Plisetsky only just turned ten _last month_. I’m way older than him. But that doesn’t matter, because he says I’m the worst here ever, and that I should just give up and--”

“It sounds like that Yuri is a bully,” Kelebek says, and then continues before Otabek can say anything. “You know we’re not supposed to listen to what bullies say. They say anything that will make you feel bad.”

Otabek takes a deep breath, like Mama showed him last year when he felt like everything was too much. He lets the breath out slowly, counting to five in his mind, and it hardly stutters. 

“Yeah,” he says. 

“It doesn’t matter if anyone is better than you,” Kelebek says then. “You’re all there to learn. What matters is that you learn everything you can, and that you practice, and that you never give up.”

“I guess,” Otabek says, and he frowns at how tiny his voice sounds. He sniffles and rubs at his eyes with his free hand. 

“Listen to me, little brother,” Kelebek says, suddenly serious. “You are kind, and you are good, and you are important.”

“Don’t quote that movie at me,” Otabek snaps, but he’s smiling when he says it, and Kelebek’s laugh on the other end of the line shows that she knows it too. 

“Well it’s true, Beka!” she insists, “And you’re good at figure skating. And most important: you really like it. That’s all that matters, right?”

“But I really hate ballet,” Otabek says, reluctant to be calmed down so easily. “And everyone says you have to be good at ballet if you want to be good at figure skating.”

“Who cares what anyone says?” she asks. “Us Altin’s have never let what anyone says stop us from doing anything. Just look at me!”

Otabek laughs, and it feels like the first real spot of joy Otabek’s felt since his last encounter with Yuri Plisetsky. 

“Look, I’m gonna give you some real life, grown up advice,” she says after a pause. 

“You’re not a grown up.”

“Shut up and listen, little brother,” she says fondly. “Keep going to those ballet lessons until the summer camp is over. Then, if you still hate it, never do ballet again. Figure out why they say you need it, and then when you get home we’ll find something else that will help with your figure skating. Okay?"

“Okay,” Otabek says, and just that word seems to lift what feels like the entire world from off of his shoulders. “Okay.”  

“Great. Now go to sleep, little brother. If I remember your schedule right, your first class tomorrow is early.” 

“Yeah. Thank you, Beka.”

“No problem, Beka,” Kelebek teases gently. “Now go to sleep. I love you.”

“God, you have to make it weird,” Otabek says, and he hangs up on his sister’s peals of laughter as they ring over the phone. 

However, once he’s tucked himself into bed, he finds that the memory of her laughter warms his heart, and it helps the cold, lonely night seem a little more friendly. Otabek grudgingly agrees with Kelebek, and decides to put Yuri Plisetsky out of his mind. 

*

It doesn’t particularly work.

It’s almost a week later before Otabek talks to Yuri again. Otabek isn’t ashamed to admit it, but he starts throwing himself into his classes, enough so that their skating instructor remarks on his change in attitude. He doesn’t want to admit that a nine (sorry, ten and a week) year old is better than him, but Yuri Plisetsky isn’t just a random ten year old. There is a reason all of the other kids keep clear of him, which starts somewhere with the stony face he wears as he kicks higher than anyone in his ballet class, or the angry mewl he wears anytime he’s off the ice. Otabek doesn’t think he’s ever seen the kid smile; not in a genuine way that wasn’t at the expense of someone else. 

If he were better at making friends, Otabek thinks Yuri would be a bully, like Kelebek said. But Otabek learned long ago that bullies need allies, and Yuri makes no allies. 

Well, he makes one ally, but Otabek doesn’t think he knows it. 

*

There’s a day towards the end of the summer, that Otabek watches Yuri and thinks it might be okay to talk to him again. He’d be lying if he said he’d stopped watching Yuri after his conversation with Kelebek. Really, the opposite had happened. He followed his sister’s advice, yes, but he’d also gone to tracking Yuri like a hawk. He’s come to terms with the fact that Yuri will probably be better than him for a while, until Otabek can find the thing that makes him special, but he’s also found a lot about the boy to puzzle over. 

For instance:

Yuri slams into the locker room like a bomb going off, and kids three and four years older than him all scramble to get out of his way. Word spreads quickly when you drop kick the oldest kid at the camp, and no one wants to be Yuri’s next victim. There’s a thunderous scowl on his face, but it wavers every now and then, like a different, deeper emotion is trying to break through. He makes such a huge fuss yanking off his skates that the locker room clears in record time. After a handful of minutes, only Otabek and Yuri remain. Otabek ducks behind a bank of lockers and focuses carefully on folding his sweater as silently as he can manage, listening with all his might to the ruckus Yuri makes on the other side of the locker room. 

Silence for nearly a full minute. 

Then: a great crashing sound, like the entire building might be falling around them, and a low, agonized growl. 

Otabek freezes, feeling caught. The only exit is blocked by the hurricane that is Yuri, who has quieted except for harsh, jagged breathing, punctuated by great shuddering breaths (the eye of the hurricane, he thinks). Otabek is familiar enough with the sound. 

Yuri Plisetsky is crying. 

And Otabek is sure that if someone sees him, that person will no longer be among the living once Yuri sets his eyes on them. 

Then, in a bout of terrible, terrible irony, an alarm on Otabek’s phone goes off, cheerfully reminding him to “Call your Mama!!” which he absolutely does not remember putting into his calendar, and which causes the sniffling to stop abruptly. Otabek frantically searches for his phone for ten of the worst seconds of his life, before he’s able to find it and shut the thing up. 

Another grueling fifteen seconds of silence. Otabek counts them ominously in his head, sure that they are his last ones on the planet. 

Then: a thin growl of a voice, pushed out of a body like it might be the only thing in the world that is keeping him alive, says, “What the hell?”

So Otabek does the only thing he really can do in that situation; he clutches his phone in his hand like a lifeline and slinks out and around the lockers to where Yuri is. 

There is an absolute disaster surrounding Yuri. The ominous crashing sound looks to have been Yuri throwing his backpack and skates across the room, where they hit the large plastic trash bin and toppled it into the far set of lockers. Yuri stands right in the midst of the mess with his feet hip width apart, his arms crossed at the chest and glaring furiously, all but barricading the exit. His eyes are red-rimmed, and every so often his breath shudders, like his body wants to continue crying. 

He looks like a soldier preparing for combat. Otabek doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything quite so alarmingly beautiful. 

“You,” Yuri says suddenly, narrowing his eyes further. “What the hell is even your problem?” 

“Nothing,” Otabek says, but Yuri shakes his head like he didn’t even hear him. 

“Do you think you’re better than me or something?” Yuri grumbles, and rubs at his eyes like he can’t quite help it. “Do you think making fun of me will help you?”

“There’s no one better than you,” Otabek says, surprised into honesty in the moment. Yuri, whose mouth already opened in a quick retort, just stares at him. Otabek continues, unsure when Yuri will come back to himself and kick him right between the eyes. “I’m not here to make fun of you.” Otabek shrugs. “I just think you look sad sometimes, is all. I thought you might want someone to talk to.”

“Someone to talk to,” Yuri repeats, except instead of angry, his voice sounds small, lost. 

He stays silent for a moment, like he's thinking the phrase over. Otabek cautiously continues. 

“Why were you crying? Is something wrong?”

“I wasn't crying,” Yuri snarls automatically. He rubs at his cheeks with the palms of his hands, so hard they leave dull red splotches in their wake. “Why do you care? You don’t even like me.”

“I do like you,” Otabek’s traitorous voice says with no input from his brain. 

Yuri exhales loudly, shakes his head twice, so hard his hair sweeps into his eyes. 

“No one likes me,” Yuri says. Then he stalks away and picks up his bag. With his back to Otabek, he says, “If you ever tell anyone about this, Altin, I will seriously have you killed.”

And with that, Yuri pushes out the room, somehow finding a way to make the normally slow, creaking locker room door slam behind him. 

“Right,” Otabek says into the empty room. A strange feeling starts fluttering around his stomach, thinking about the fact that Yuri actually knows his name. “Your secret’s safe with me, I guess.”

*

After that, Yuri seems to disappear. He must work hard to avoid Otabek the last two weeks of summer camp, especially because they share at least one class a day. Otabek is still floating on the simple knowledge that Yuri Plisetsky knows who he is, other than The Jerk Who Hit Him With His Backpack One Time. 

He thinks about Yuri’s angry voice in the locker room that day, when he’d said _no one likes me_ the way someone would talk about a frustrating fact. Wonders just what it was that made Yuri Plisetsky cry quietly to himself in a locker room. 

But he doesn’t get any answers to his questions, because eventually the last day of camp arrives, and Otabek is sitting on the sidewalk just outside of the skating rink, watching the little dot on Google Maps as it inches closer and closer. Kelebek has been sharing the family’s location since the plane touched down in St. Petersburg, and Otabek has drained his battery watching them. He’s a light packer, and he’s using his only suitcase as a seat while he waits. 

Which is why he’s there when a green, dusty-looking truck pulls up to the sidewalk and an older man pulls himself out of it. The man has a salt-and-pepper beard, but, upon closer inspection, not quite. It looks more like the salt and the pepper have been separated meticulously, the pepper of the beard shoved into the middle. He waves at Otabek as he leans on the hood of the car, waiting. Otabek waves back. The old man pulls his coat tighter around himself, which Otabek finds strange as it’s the end of August and the bright sunlight more than makes up for the cool breeze nipping at the tips of his ears. 

“Dedushka!” a voice says, and it’s not until he sees Yuri’s tiny form zoom forward that he believes it’s actually him. “Privjet Dedushka! You’re here!”

He sounds--well. He sounds happy. Yuri all but pounces on his grandfather, wrapping his arms around the man’s waist and laughing. Otabek hasn’t heard Yuri laugh in the two months that he’s known him (and been obsessively watching him). It’s--bizarre. 

Which is when Yuri finally disentangles himself from his grandfather, and his gaze inevitably hits Otabek. The change is immediate. The smile slips off his face and he pulls away from his grandfather. Yuri’s grandfather sighs. Otabek’s eyes turn to him, and he sees the man grimace a little before putting a hand on Yuri’s head.

“Let’s go home, Yurotchka,” he says.

Yuri glares at Otabek one last time before he slams into his grandfather’s car. Otabek can see his feet where he puts them on the dash. The car rumbles back to life, and that’s the last time he sees Yuri Plisetsky: the top of his shiny, blonde head and the tips of his converse before he disappears. 

Otabek’s phone chimes about thirty seconds later, just before he sees a black rental car pull into the driveway, Kelebek leaning half-out of the car and screaming like a maniac. Otabek smiles and puts an arm up to signal her, and tries to put Yuri Plisetsky out of his mind.

 

*

Weeks pass. It’s eventually decided that Otabek will train in Montreal. He is looking for the best trainer there is, someone who will make him the next Viktor Nikiforov, or the next Stephane Lambiel, and it's always been obvious that that person isn't in Almaty. His parents, as always, are very supportive, and do all of the looking. He sits through at least ten phone interviews with strange voices in distant corners of the world, and when his parents ask which he likes best, Otabek shrugs. In truth, he would prefer to train under Yakov Feltsman, but not for any of his usual reasons. Otabek knows that he has already taken Yuri Plisetsky under his wing, and Otabek would give anything to train alongside that cantankerous kid. But Otabek can't tell them any of that, and he's already made such a big deal about hating half of his summer classes that they don't even mention Yakov. So, Mama and Dad decide on someone and Otabek packs his suitcases again.

There is a long argument in the dining room one night, when Rada, Otabek's oldest sister, finds out just when he's leaving and pitches the biggest fit in the history of the planet.

"We can't just send him out there alone!" Rada's voice shudders through the walls, and Otabek sits quietly on the living room sofa and pretends he's not going red in the face.

His brother, Aydin, sits with him, fidgeting with Mama's tablet even though it's been on the Minion Rush title screen for the past five minutes. Aydin turns to him, and Otabek smiles a little, winces when he hears his parent's soft answer interjected by Rada's angry: "I don't care if he thinks that's what he wants! You think I don't know what leaving feels like? Going somewhere you don't know anyone??"

“It sounds like Rada wants to go to Canada with you,” Aydin says, before turning back to the tablet and absently starting a game. 

“Maybe,” Otabek says, and watches as Aydin, who has a high score of 3.7 million in the game, crashes within five seconds. “Maybe she just wants to move out. She's eighteen, after all.”

“Maybe,” Aydin says, and then fiddles with his screen's brightness for a few seconds. “Will you be gone for very long?” 

“I don’t know. Maybe,” is Otabek’s response. 

Aydin frowns. At eight years old, Aydin is probably the sharpest kid in their family; he’s had his nose in a book since pretty much the day he learned how to read, and since a young age, he would sit and watch as Otabek struggled with his math. Otabek is sure Aydin will really be a genius one day.

“Zerrin will miss you,” he says.

Otabek laughs at that. 

“Do you remember when Zerrin threw a tantrum because she saw a puppy at the mall and wanted one?”

Aydin giggles and puts the tablet down.

“Yeah,” he says. “She cried for two days straight, and then you gave her one of those weird sugar-free lollipops and she forgot all about it.”

“Exactly,” Otabek says, and smiles again at his brother. “I’m sure Zerrin will be fine.”

“Well, okay, maybe I’ll miss you,” Aydin says, and starts picking at the hem of his faded Power Rangers shirt. “I won’t have anyone to play with when you’re gone.”

“You’ll have Kelebek,” he says, and Aydin sticks his tongue out at that. 

“I’m still mad at her for taking all of my colored pencils. It won’t be the same, Otabek!”

“I know,” Otabek says, and slings an arm around Aydin’s shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

“Well,” Aydin hedges. After a second, he snuggles farther into Otabek’s embrace. “As long as you’re sorry. I guess it’ll be okay. You’ll call, right?”

“Every day,” Otabek promises, and it’s worth it for Aydin’s crooked grin. 

“Are we having a snuggle party without me?” Zerrin’s sleepy voice says from the doorway. 

She’s in her Eeyore footie pajamas, rubbing at her eyes with a tiny fist. Her dark hair is a mess of curly brambles around her face. Mama spends almost an hour a night combing her hair and meticulously braiding it before bed, and yet she always wakes with it like a lion’s mane around her head. Zerrin is only just turning four, and she has everyone in the Altin house hopelessly wrapped around her finger. Aydin laughs from where he’s crammed himself into Otabek’s armpit.

“Never, Zerrin,” Aydin says, and gestures for her to join them. 

Zerrin doesn’t need to be told twice. She leaps up onto the couch and scrambles into Otabek’s lap, squealing when Aydin tickles her in punishment for the faceful of hair it gives him. They are a pile of laughter and happiness when Mama, Dad, and Rada finally leave the kitchen almost half an hour later. All of them get a scolding, as it’s way past their bedtime, and yet Otabek remembers it as one of the happiest nights spent in Almaty. 

 

*

He and Rada fly to Quebec three weeks later. Rada is eighteen, and has a scowl that can send even grown men running in the opposite direction. She’s a godsend during the impossibly long flights, the hours spent waiting at airports in the dead of night. Otabek is eleven for another three weeks, and some part of him knows he could have made the trip on his own--he flew to St. Petersburg all on his own, after all--but he’s glad he doesn’t have to this time. Rada is headstrong enough to argue with flight attendants in the dead of night when they mix up some of their flight information, and her voice is calm and soothing when Otabek gets motion sick six hours into their connecting flight (Istanbul to New York City, still only ¾ of the way there). She rubs her hand across the small of Otabek’s back as the plane shudders ever so slightly through turbulence, and Otabek is so desperately grateful for her, even when he vomits into one of those little paper bags they have in the seat pockets and some of it gets on her seat belt. 

“You’re okay, Beka,” she says quietly, and Otabek loves her so much it hurts. 

It takes about three days--give or take, Otabek still doesn’t quite understand how timezones work exactly--before they are pulling up to an apartment complex in a taxi, and Rada is fumbling her way through an English conversation with their driver. They are in apartment 6A; Otabek remembers because he scrawled it onto his hand hours before leaving for the airport because Kelebek had a dream he’d forgotten it and ended up in Texas. 

(“Don’t get lost,” she’d whispered as she hugged him fiercely, and Otabek pretended there weren’t tears in his eyes when he laughed with her. 

“I’ll try,” he’d whispered back. “But you were always the one with the sense of direction.”) 

The ink itself was washed away somewhere 8000 km in the air, but the memory of the stark black number is burned into his brain. 

The building itself is large and pretty dull, if you ask Otabek, with a tall, metal fence circling most of the property. His eyes travel up and up, bouncing between the three sets of balconies on the huge brick wall. Otabek grabs his backpack and stumbles out of the car; he lets Rada struggle with the rest of their baggage as he wanders towards the gate. 

That’s when he notices a woman and kid standing at one of the entryways, waving at them. Otabek frowns and wanders towards them, ignoring Rada’s muttering behind him. 

“Hello!” the woman says brightly in English. “You must be Otabek. Your sister and your mother said to expect you soon.”

“Yes,” Otabek says seriously, and he holds out his hand to the woman. 

She laughs a little and shakes hands with him, then motions to her son. 

“This is Jean,” she says. “He’s training to be an ice skater as well.” 

“Bonjour,” the boy says, and when his Mom says something to him in another language, he says “Sorry. Hello. We’re going to be rink mates.”

“Hello,” Otabek says, then looks from Jean to the woman. 

He doesn’t quite know how to ask who she is. Luckily, Rada takes that moment to yell over to Otabek in sharp Kazakh, “Beka! I’m not carrying all of your luggage up those stairs! Come help!”

“Coming!” he says, then switches back to English. “Sorry. I have to… My sister…”

He’s trying to remember the English word for ‘help’ when Jean beams at him and rushes forward. 

“I’ll help!” he says, lumbering over to Rada’s side. 

Jean’s mother smiles self-indulgently, as she watches him run. 

“Don’t forget to ask, Jean!” she calls over. 

Otabek watches as Rada turns to him. He says something that Otabek can’t quite catch, something that has Rada barking a sharp peal of laughter that he doesn’t think he’s heard from his sister in a while. She ruffles his hair roughly and Otabek feels just a tiny pang of jealousy before Rada turns to him again.

“Just because you’ve already made a friend doesn’t mean you get to weasel out of work, Otabek!”

Otabek listens to Jean’s laugh, the too-loud bray of it. Has he made a friend? Then he thinks about the angry scowl Yuri sent his way, the last of him he’ll see in a year, maybe more (maybe a lifetime, Otabek thinks, if he never gets better at skating). 

“Otabek!” Jean calls, heaving the largest piece of luggage across the pavement with a grin half the size of his face. “Your sister says you have to show me where your apartment is. Come on!”

So Otabek rushes over and grabs his duffel bag, where the printed out map of the complex is folded neatly into a side pocket, with the tiny square marked 6A that has been highlighted, and a small happy face drawn neatly beside it.

 _Good luck in Montreal!_ Kelebek’s neat handwriting reminds him.

 _Don’t forget to write!_ Aydin’s somewhat sloppier scrawl says under it. And beneath that, a long red squiggle, a coded message from Zerrin. Otabek misses them already. But he takes a deep breath and works through it. Rada is here with him, and next to her, a boy who he’s known for all of five seconds and already looks at him like they’ve been friends forever. Otabek can live with that for a while.

 

*

Jean and his mother leave a few minutes after all the luggage has been hauled into their two bedroom apartment, Miss Leroy promising that she would be back in a few days to check up on them.

“We don’t need a babysitter,” Rada grouses, and Miss Leroy just smiles pleasantly.

“Of course not,” she says, “We’ll see you Wednesday.”

“Wednesday,” Otabek repeats in a half stupor. Suddenly the days of travelling are catching up with him. 

“We need to go sightseeing before we start training again,” Jean says, much too excited for how tired he should be, in Otabek’s opinion. “We’ll go to Notre Dame Basilica, and then to the observatory, and then to La Fontaine, and if there’s time we could try the Barbie Expo, I know people think it’s just for girls but--”

“Jean,” Miss Leroy says, and Jean smiles, just a little shy. “Let’s let them rest, and then we’ll see how much sightseeing they’d like to do, hm?”

“Okay,” Jean says. “But it’s the middle of the day. Why would you need to rest?”

Otabek stares at Jean like he’s grown a second head. For some reason, it makes Rada laugh. 

“You really are something, kid,” she says, and it could have been a cutting thing to say. Instead, it comes out sounding fond.

Jean beams like he’s been given a great compliment, then spends the next few minutes trying to say goodbye and getting distracted by his own train of thought. His mother gently guides them both to the exit, and she smiles at them both a bit sheepishly when she finally says: 

“Let’s get some lunch, Jean,” and pulls him by the hand out the door. 

They can still hear his chattering down the hall for a few long minutes. 

“Well, it looks like we’ve met your polar opposite, Beka,” Rada says. 

Otabek smiles a little. 

“He is...a lot,” Otabek decides, and while Rada laughs, Otabek wanders into the first room he sees with a bed and collapses onto it.

“I’ll wake you when I grab some food, okay?” Rada calls after him, but Otabek is already half asleep, and doesn’t have the wherewithal to reply. 

 

*

Otabek sleeps for sixteen uninterrupted, blissful hours.

He startles awake suddenly, unsure of what it was that woke him except for his own body telling him it was never going to go to sleep again. There’s a weak grey light streaming in through a crack in his curtains, which aren’t as thick as the blackout ones he has in his room in Almaty. He realizes then that he doesn’t quite know where he is, so he has to stare at the small oval mirror above his bed for a long time before he remembers Jean and his neverending enthusiasm. 

Right, Canada. Skating.

So he stumbles out of what has now become his room, if the pile of his luggage is any indication, and into the living room of what will be his and Rada’s home for the foreseeable future. The first thing he notices is the appalling amount of light streaming into the open, living room space. There are giant, floor-to-ceiling windows that take up most of the far right wall. Through it, they have a great view of the Montreal skyline, with a view of the bay just behind a large bank of buildings. Otabek stares for a long time, inching closer to the window until his fingertips reach out and touch the glass. The weak grey sunlight shines over tall buildings, a pale pink tinge surrounding them. It must be morning then. Early enough that the sun hasn't really decided to come up all the way yet. He looks down and sees a straight drop of six stories, and feels a little dizzy.

“Oh, so you’re finally awake,” Rada’s voice says from somewhere.

Otabek looks around for her, and finally spots her in the kitchen, leaning against the fridge in her pajamas. 

“How long have you been up?”

“Ages, little brother,” she says, but Otabek can tell that it’s a lie. Her hair is a frazzled mess, and he can still see a streak of red lines along the side of her face, probably indentations from her pillow. “Are you hungry?” 

“Yes,” Otabek says immediately.

“Me too,” she replies, then throws her head back and laughs. “We should have asked Madame Leroy to get us some groceries, huh?”

“Rada,” Otabek whines, and that only makes Rada laugh harder. 

Otabek despairs at his older sister, and wonders what sort of magic she cast on Mama and Dad to make them believe that she was mature enough to look after Otabek on the other side of the world.

“Okay, okay,” she says, and grabs a pair of keys off the table. “Let’s go see if there’s anything to eat in the neighborhood.”

There turns out to be a small cafe a block over, and Otabek eats what feels like his weight in mac and cheese while Rada picks at a BLT (the servers looked at both of them kind of funny when ordering, possibly for ordering lunch foods before sunrise, but Otabek doesn't care today). They complain about every airline they took to get here, and the taxi drive, and the weather, and it helps ease the miserable ache in his side when he thinks about Kelebek. 

“It’ll get easier, kid,” Rada says towards the end of the meal. Otabek’s been kicking his feet absently under the table and picking at the last of his mac and cheese. He looks up, and Rada is holding a potato chip between her fingers, frowning at him. “The homesickness.”

“How do you know?” Otabek asks.  

Rada looks at him like he’s an idiot, then shoves the chip in her mouth. With crumbs spilling out of her mouth, she says:

“You know I’m adopted, brother,” in an exasperated tone. “Or did you forget? I thought. Well. I didn’t think it would ever stop hurting.” Rada looks away for a moment. Otabek watches the way her jaw works for a few seconds before she continues. “And getting shipped to the other side of the country to some foster family wasn’t the best thing either, was it? But, you know. Eventually Mama and Dad found me, and we figured out how to be a family.”

“Do you miss them?” Otabek asks, and wonders why, in his entire life, he’s never thought to ask.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Rada says. She shrugs. “But now, I can’t really remember what they looked like. I think I remember my mother had red hair, but I can’t say for sure. Now, when I think about having parents, it’s just Mama. Just Dad.” She looks down at her plate, and for a second, she seems to disappear somewhere deep inside of herself. Otabek wonders if she might cry. But, just seconds later, her head snaps up again, her eyes boring straight into Otabek. “What I mean to say, brother, is that there are lots of types of hurt in the world, but most of them stop hurting if you have someone with you who cares. And,” she looks around, as if checking for eavesdroppers. When she turns to him again, her grin is knife-sharp. “I care about you, little brother,” she whispers like a secret.

“God, you’re so lame,” Otabek says, but he’s smiling even though his ears are burning, which he supposes must be the point.

“Besides,” Rada says, “This isn’t even that bad! You’re in a cool new city with your cool older sister, plus you’re here to be the greatest figure skater in Kazakstan’s history and! On top of all of that, _all_ of your family is still alive! Easy peasy!”

“That’s not fair,” Otabek complains. “You can’t just say that when someone’s sad to try to win a My Childhood Was Worse Than Yours Contest, or something.”

“Watch me,” Rada says, and shoves another fistful of chips into her mouth. 

Otabek throws a piece of macaroni at her, and he thinks that maybe she has a point. This isn’t so bad after all, especially when, as they’re leaving, she pulls Otabek into a bone-crushing hug and says, “We’ll call the little monsters when we get home, okay? Mama said to call when we could anyway.” 

 

*

Jean shows up at their apartment sometime around noon that day, without his mother this time and clutching an envelope in his left hand. He’s wearing a bright red jacket that clashes painfully with his blue hat, but the strange mix of shy and anxious on his face keeps Otabek from commenting on it. It’s not quite enough for Rada, who opens the door and keeps a straight face only long enough to let him in and get Otabek before she sniggers to herself and shuts herself up in her room. 

“Your mom let you come out here alone?” Otabek asks after a few moments of awkward silence.

“We don’t live that far,” Jean says. “It’s lucky really. It’s just a five minute walk. And sometimes Mama lets me take the train if I can write down all the transfers I have to take, and if I’m going somewhere where there’s an adult she can call.” Here, he holds up the envelope, and pulls out a sheet of paper with meticulous, cramped looking handwriting with different jumbled phrases. “I’m supposed to call when I get here.”

“Why are you here?” he can’t help but ask as he watches Jean fumble through his pockets searching for his phone.  

“We said we’d check up on you, remember?” Jean says. “When you first got in! I came by yesterday but your sister said you were still asleep and to go away.”

“Oh,” Otabek says. “I’m sorry she’s so mean.”

“She wasn’t mean!” Jean says earnestly, but Otabek doesn’t believe him for a second. Rada’s almost always mean. “It’s not mean if she’s honest.”

“Honesty is sometimes the meanest thing there is,” Otabek says, and when Jean frowns at him, he shrugs. 

“Mama says I can take you to the skating rink today if you want. After I call her.”

“Okay,” Otabek says, and smiles. 

So that’s how Otabek spends the rest of the day. They tell Rada, and she gives Otabek a handful of bills that she assures him is not fake money, and then she shoves them out of the house.

“Don’t forget to eat kids,” she says with a crooked grin, and slams the door behind them before Otabek can say anything else, fumbling with his bag and his skates. 

They walk to a bus stop three blocks away, and when they get on, Jean consults his paper very carefully, sitting up on his knees to squint out the window and mumbling street names under his breath as they pass them. The skating rink is large and imposing, but it overlooks the water. The bright day is deceptively cold, and Otabek pulls his scarf tighter around his neck as he follows Jean up the steps of the facility. 

This is his life now, he thinks as he follows Jean into the still cold rink. He hears the telltale sound of skates scraping against ice, and Jean’s excited voice as he talks about all the different places they can get lunch when his mother gets there, and isn’t he just going to love being rinkmates?

Otabek doesn’t respond, but Jean takes that as affirmation anyway. 

*

That’s how Otabek’s first year in Montreal goes. He finds out that Nathalie Leroy trains five other kids in the junior bracket, two of which are already competing and are about to move into seniors. Her husband, Alain, trains another four in senior’s ice dancing. Otabek makes friends easily with the three boys and two girls Nathalie trains.

Jean--does not.

Otabek discovers that while Jean is exuberant and over-excited off the ice, on the ice it translates into a thick-headed kind of cockiness that everyone else finds off-putting. 

“I don’t know how you can be friends with him,” Tara, the oldest of Nathalie’s students, whispers to him one day as they’re watching Jean. 

Otabek shrugs and keeps his eyes on Jean, who performs a shaky double salchow and whoops loudly when he lands it. Tara rolls her eyes and flicks a curl of her red hair over her shoulder again. 

“He’s not so bad,” Otabek says, and then Jean has to spoil it by doing that weird thing with his hands and shouting _It’s JJ style_ across the ice.

“Stop trying to make JJ style a thing,” Otabek can’t help but call out over the ice, and Jean laughs so hard that he snorts. 

“If you say so,” Tara says, and then leaves him to go stretch again. 

*

“Are you making friends, Otabek?” his mother asks over skype at the end of October.

She’s sitting curled up on the couch, her long hair pulled up neatly at the nape of her neck and a grey fleece blanket draped over her shoulders. Otabek searches her face for any differences, small signs to show that time has moved on without him, but he can’t find any. Mama is still as beautiful as ever, with her big brown eyes and the warm smile. Otabek thinks about all the times he’s snuggled into her side on that couch in the cold Fall months; how she’d pull the grey blanket around the both of them while she absentmindedly rubbed circles into his back. Otabek misses her so much in that moment; he thinks he might cry. 

“Yes, Mama,” Otabek says, and she smiles over her reading glasses. 

His birthday has passed here in Canada by the time he takes the call, and he’s already had to endure Zerrin, Aydin, and Kelebek singing ‘Happy birthday to you!’ loudly and in heavily accented English before Mama was able to wrestle the tablet away from them again to make up for it. He has a feeling that Rada will do the same, and is supremely suspicious that she wasn’t present for that skype debacle.

“How is your sister?”

“She is fine,” Otabek says, and Rada sticks her tongue out at him from her spot on the leather sofa. 

“Good,” Mama says. “Your father will be back home in a month. I’ll make sure he calls you.”

“Okay,” Otabek answers. “I miss him.”

“We miss him too,” Mama agrees; she smiles again, and this time it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “We miss you, too.” 

“Mama,” Otabek whines, and feels his cheeks pink.

“Are you happy, son?”

“Yes?” Otabek says, although his voice tilts up at the end, so it sounds more like a question. 

“Okay,” Mom says, but Otabek knows she’s not convinced. “Rada will tell me if you’re lying.”

“Mama,” Otabek says, and then takes a deep breath. “I am happy. I made friends.”

She doesn’t ask him how his training is going, which Otabek is thankful for; he already spends too much time going over every single one of his weaknesses while he lays in bed at night. He doesn’t need to explain them to his mother over a pixelated skype connection. She does, however, ask about Jean, and when Otabek simply stares at her with his mouth slightly agape she smiles at him, a mischievous glint in the corner of her eyes. 

“Rada told me all about him,” she says, and Otabek glares over at his sister, who is suddenly completely engrossed in her book. “She says he’s nice enough.”

“I said he’s an annoying kid who will probably grow up to be some kind of fuck boi,” Rada says, not looking up from her book.

“He doesn’t quite know when to stop talking, but I like him well enough,” Otabek hedges, but then clams up about it because Mama gets a weird gleam in her eye that he doesn’t like at all.

“Maybe we should invite him to Almaty,” Mama says.

“Please, no,” Otabek says, thinking that Kelebek would never let him live it down if she ever met Jean. 

Mama’s gentle laughter is enough to heal the unending embarrassment he feels thinking of Kelebek ever meeting Jean, and for a moment, it’s enough. 

 

*

The months drag on. Otabek learns how to do a toe loop, then Jean helps him figure out the basics for a salchow, and Nathalie Leroy despairs at the lines of his Ina Bauer. She starts sending him to Ballet lessons with Jean, because the only ballet instructor who will work with Jean Jaques Leroy anymore is Nathalie’s childhood friend. Otabek comes as close as he ever has to throwing a tantrum, but in the end he tags along.

Just as he suspects, he hates absolutely every minute of it. Amelie says he just needs to stretch, and that if he works at it, he’ll pick it up in no time. Otabek wants to tell her that he already tried that, and a pair of dangerous green eyes told him he has no business even trying to keep up.

“Ballet won’t make me any different, Jean,” Otabek sighs while they wait in the lobby for Rada to come pick them up. “I’ll just be bad at it, and then be bad at skating.”

“So what will make you different?” Jean asks. He looks down at his jazz shoes and frowns. Jean has no problems at all with ballet, but he says he understands. After all, he hadn’t liked ballet very much at the start either. But he’s good at it, and Jean always likes doing things he knows he's good at. 

“I don’t know,” Otabek says.

Jean stays silent, which is strange considering he normally can’t go more than five minutes without saying what’s on his mind. He’s quiet through the whole car ride back to his place too, and when they drop him off, Rada watches Otabek through the rearview mirror with an eyebrow raised.

“What did you say to him?” she asks. 

Otabek shrugs.

 

*

“I figured it out!” Jean says one day weeks later with absolutely no context. 

It’s the end of a long day of practise, and Otabek is only just unlacing his shoes when Jean rushes towards him, grabbing him by the wrist and tugging insistently. Jean refuses to elaborate, and so Otabek lets himself get led around Montreal, through a series of metro stops and a long bus ride, until they reach a dull-looking grey building.

“Jean,” Otabek tries, but Jean only smiles in his annoyingly guileless way and pushes into the building.

The second they step through the door, Otabek is assaulted by a thumpingly loud bass line, so loud that it shakes the floor ever so slightly. It’s not loud enough to cover the sharp bray of a man counting in time to the music, however. 

It takes a while for the words to coalesce into actual meaning, and it’s only when the disembodied voice screams, “Push ups, twenty seconds!” that Otabek finally realizes where they might be.

“Did you bring me to a gym?” Otabek asks. “Why?”

“You said you wanted something that would make you special,” Jean says, and Otabek has to scramble his memory to figure out just what he’s talking about. Eventually, it clicks. Jean must see it in his face, because he grins again and continues. “I got you kickboxing classes.”

“You got me what?” 

Which is about the time when a very large human turns the corner with a clipboard. His arms might be the size of Otabek’s head. 

“Otabek Altin, right?” he says, and looks up. Otabek nods, and the man smiles warmly. 

The man’s name is Dan, and he tells Otabek that his gym’s name is Fighter Physix, because he helps folks of all ages and body types get in the best shape of their life, with the help of anatomy and science. He has a nose piercing and three tattoos along his right forearm. Otabek doesn’t know if he’s in the best shape of his life or not, but Dan is nice enough, and he offers both of them their first kickboxing class for free, which is nice because that means that Jean doesn’t abandon him at this gym that feels more like some sort of warehouse.

The gym is, in fact, just a repurposed warehouse. There is a large boxing rink tucked into a corner, where two adults are currently boxing in full training gear. A woman and what might be her trainer are lifting weights in the small free weights area by the front, but other than that, the space is taken up by a large set of gym mats, with 15 or so bright red punching bags spaced evenly apart. A section of the gym mats is cordoned off and empty, and Otabek wonders what it would be for. 

“I’ve got a class starting in about five minutes,” Dan says, and motions to where five people are wrapping their hands meticulously with long strips of what look like brightly colored bandages. Then he points to the cordoned off area of mats. “Then there's a Muay Thai lesson after that, that you can watch if you like. I’ve got a couple of pairs of boxing gloves and hand wraps that you can use for today.”

Otabek nods, and Dan rushes off to grab them.

“What are we even doing here, Jean?” Otabek asks, taking in the room again. 

The faint smell of pine isn’t quite enough to cover the musty sweat odor. It doesn’t seem to bother any of the adults around them, however. He watches as a woman with her hair pulled into a tight bun sits and starts to stretch.

“We’re experimenting!” Jean says excitedly, which Otabek thinks is just typical of his friend. 

Which is how Otabek spends the next fifty minutes doing one of the most intense cardio workouts of his life. He and Jean leave the building with their arms and legs sore, from following Dan’s meticulous instructions on how to hit a punching bag correctly with fists, legs, and elbows.

They take the bus back home, and when Jean almost collapses climbing down the steps at their stop, Otabek smiles and thinks it’s only fair.

 

*

Otabek goes back two days later, and then again next week. After that, he’s there three times a week. 

It  gets worked into his schedule, and Dan, being a personal trainer first and a business owner second, builds him a training routine based on strength, with the added benefits of flexibility.

“I don’t know much about figure skating,” Dan admits sheepishly. “But I know some about dance, and I know a lot about the human body. One of my best MMA fighters was a dancer first. At the end of the day, you’re moving the human body in new and intense ways, just like the rest of us. We’ll help you figure it out, kid.”

And the interesting thing is that it starts to change the way he moves on the ice. He can feel it in his bones in February, when he does a toe loop and instead of imagining all of his terrible ballet lessons, he thinks about the way he turns his hip when hitting the punching bag. He goes into a fan spiral, and the only way he can get his free leg high enough to make it look nice is if he does an axe kick before hand, which finally gives him enough momentum to properly execute a camel spin at the speed that Nathalie wants from him. He stops suddenly, and when he looks over to the boards, Nathalie is waving; he can clearly see the smile spread across her face.

“Wonderful, Otabek,” she says. “Very powerful.”

Otabek tries hard to quell the blush that starts at the back of his neck, but from the looks the other kids are giving him, he doesn’t think it quite works. 

 

*

“I want to go to Yakov’s training camp again,” Otabek says apropos of nothing a few days later. Mama, who is standing at the kitchen counter rummaging through one of the cupboards, stops and stares. 

“You hated camp last summer,” she says.

“Yes,” Otabek replies, and leaves it at that. He goes a little red around the ears, and tries hard not to think about a pair of bright green eyes, narrowed in frustrations and saying _if you’re not any good, you should just go home._ “I want to go back anyway.”

“Otabek,” Mama says, and the full name is a sure sign that she’s worried. “Are you sure? Rada and Nathalie say you’ve improved so much in the past year. Surely you want to continue with them.”

“I do.”

“But you want to go anyway,” Mama says, frowning. 

“Yes.”

She stares at him some more, before she picks up her tablet and wanders over to the living room, where Otabek watches her curl up on the sofa. 

“Are you happy, son?” she asks again.

“What? Mama, of course,” he says, slightly baffled. She keeps staring at him, wide-eyed and worried, so Otabek blushes and turns away. “There was a boy, at camp. He--well. I want to show him that I’ve gotten better. I think he trains under Yakov full time. He’ll definitely be there if I go this summer.”

Otabek suddenly finds the sleeve of his shirt very interesting. He picks at the frayed bottom--torn after a particularly hard fall during a sparring session--until he hears Mama sigh on the other end of the skype call. When he chances a glance up at her again, he sees a small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. 

“Oh, Bekatya,” she says, which only makes Otabek blush more. “Okay. I’ll talk with your father, and I’ll email Lilia Baranovskaya to see if she has any space left. Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Yes,” Otabek says, without missing a beat. He thinks about Jean’s smiling face, and the easy set of Tara’s shoulders as she glides across the ice. He thinks of the smell of his gym, sweat and chemical cleaners and the satisfying weight of a pair of boxing gloves strapped to his hands. He thinks about Yuri Plisetsky, who will be eleven and has no doubt only improved as the year has progressed. “Yes, Mama. This is what I want.”

“Okay,” she says, and the look in her eyes is full of all the support Otabek could ever need. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

 

*

Rada is, of course, unhappy when Otabek tells her the news. 

“What am I supposed to do here in Canada without you?” she asks; Otabek thinks it should be strange to see her frowning down at a pan with eggs like they’ve personally offended her. Yet, here they are. She doesn’t look up, so she just looks like she’s arguing with the pan. “Just keep living here like my entire family isn’t on the other side of the Pacific Ocean?”

“You don’t have to stay in Montreal,” Otabek says reasonably. “Mama said she could sublet the apartment while I’m gone. You could move back to Almaty.”

“And give up all this freedom?” Rada snaps. She flips the eggs angrily, and Otabek gives up. “I have a job here, Otabek. And responsibilities, I can't just leave them all behind!”

“Then stay,” Otabek says quite reasonably. 

“You're twelve,” Rada snaps and drops a plate with his fried egg on the counter with a clatter. “You don't get to tell me what to do.”

Otabek decides that he won't ever understand his sister and lets the topic drop. 

 

*

Jean takes the news much better, considering. Otabek expects him to whine and moan up until the day Otabek flies away, but instead, he just turns quiet for most of practise. He hardly even gloats when he finally figures out a flying sit-spin. 

“You’ll come back, right?” he asks at the end of the day. They’re untying their skates, and Otabek notices that Jean is fumbling with the laces, as if unsure how to undo them.

“Yes,” Otabek says, and he thinks he imagines it, but Jean’s shoulders seem to sag, a little like some tension is bleeding out of him. 

“Do you promise?” he asks, and for a moment, he reminds Otabek of his little brother Aydin, so much so that he wraps an arm around Jean’s shoulders in reply.

“Yes, Jean,” Otabek says, a tiny smile on his lips. “I promise.”

“Awesome!” Jean says, and quick as a flash, a smile is back on his face. “You’re my best friend, Otabek! And I want to show you how much better I’ll get at the end of September. You’ll see! I’ll be the king of skating!”

“Right,” Otabek says. “Sure. King JJ.”

“Exactly!” Jean says, his eyes wide with excitement. He does the weird thing with his hands again, and when he says “It’s JJ Style!” Otabek, against his better judgement, copies the motion. 

Having friends is weird, he decides. But they’re both laughing, and honestly, that’s all that really matters.

 

*

St. Petersburg in the summer is just as muggy as he remembers. It’s cooler at night, at least. There’s a snap to the wind as it rolls between buildings that keeps winter in the back of everyone’s minds, even in the height of summer. But here, with his tiny window open, Otabek can pretend like he’s back in Montreal, listening to Rada’s god awful punk rock music from a room away, or wandering a park on a bright afternoon in March with Jean. But he’s alone out here, and more or less friendless, and so when he slips out onto the porch of the dorm rooms, the breeze and the darkness and the long, empty stretch of road ahead of him warp into something menacing, almost frightening. 

There is not a lot that Otabek is afraid of, normally. 

Things Otabek is afraid of, a list written in his head that will never see the light of day:

1) Spiders

2) Falling off a tall building

3)Yuri Plisetsky seeing Otabek’s terrible axel and telling him he’s not good enough again

But the dark has never been on it. He looks out into the darkness again, and lets the loneliness settle into his bones. Maybe he’s afraid of loneliness. Maybe that’s why he’s never protested Rada following him around the world as he figures out his skating path. What would he be like if she hadn’t traveled around the world with him? But Mama always says that it’s useless to dwell on what-ifs.

He stares out into the night for another long five minutes, committing the ragged pulse of his heart to memory, then goes inside to sleep. 

He wonders if he'll see Yuri tomorrow. 

 

*

He doesn’t, actually, see Yuri tomorrow. He’s been put in with the older bank of students this year, probably because he’s now twelve and--well. He doesn’t want to say that he’s improved so much since last year, but maybe he has. Last summer was his first time taking any sort of formal course relating to figure skating, and it most definitely showed. Now, well, he still needs a lot of help, but he likes to think that his year spent with Nathalie helps somewhat. 

He meets a boy with auburn hair in his first class of the summer (which happens to be an intermediate ballet class, and Otabek already knows he’s going to hate it). The boy has his phone out, the music coming out of his earbuds so loud Otabek can hear it a full meter away. He looks up from his phone and smiles. 

“Hello,” the boy says in near perfect English. “My name is Leo.”

“Hi,” Otabek says. He sits cross-legged next to the boy, who taps the screen of his phone before shoving it roughly into his bag.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he asks, but doesn’t so much as wait for a response before he’s leaning forward and whispering, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I hate ballet.”

Otabek looks up from where he was half-heartedly pulling his ballet slippers on, frowning.

“You do?”

“Yes,” Leo says, looking around as if they might be overheard. “I do contemporary dance and hip hop in Colorado, but all of this structured stuff is just so hard.”

“I do kickboxing instead,” Otabek says, “ I hate ballet too.”

“That is SO COOL,” Leo says, and maybe jumps up a little from where he’s been sitting. “Does that help? With your skating?”

“More than ballet ever did,” Otabek says, and Leo grins at him again. Then, he adds, “My name is Otabek.”

“Otabek,” Leo repeats, and then their instructor walks into the room, so they all stand. “Awesome. We need to stick together, man. Ballet haters gotta unite.”

Which is a pretty strange thing to say, but Otabek doesn’t necessarily disagree. 

Plus, listening to Leo grumbling under his breath beside him while they both struggle through the barre exercises makes it all a little bit more bearable, this time around. 

After class, Leo grabs him by the arm and says, “Let’s get lunch,” and Otabek doesn’t really have a reason not to, so he follows Leo to the cafeteria on the other side of the dance studio.

Before Jean, Otabek was never too good at making friends. He was always the quiet type, and people mostly tended to ignore him. Plus, he’s never been bothered much by eating lunch alone, or reading during recess when no one would play with him. His parents worried all through elementary school for him. 

Perhaps that’s why Mama was so excited to hear he’d made a friend in Jean so quickly, all those months before.

It’s the same with Leo in St. Petersburg. Leo is quick to laugh and doesn’t have a problem filling in the long silences with conversation. He doesn’t care that Otabek doesn’t talk much, or that his face always looks like he’s mildly frustrated about something. It’s--nice. He’d thought it was a character trait unique to Jean Jacques Leroy (AKA the most annoying boy on the planet), but Leo is just as friendly as Jean ever was, without being overbearing or cocky. 

He likes making friends. 

 

*

“I’m glad to hear that it wasn’t just a fluke with Jean,” Rada says over the phone that night. “Maybe he’s brainwashed you into thinking people are actually good to be around.”

“Maybe,” Otabek says just to hear his sister laugh. “Are you still in Canada?”

“Nope!” She says triumphantly. “I’m back home with the gremlins and the gang!”

In the background, he hears a muffled commotion; Otabek imagines Zerrin, Aydin, and Kelebek all fighting to get the phone away from Rada to say hi first. He can’t stop the smile that creeps up into his face.

“How is ballet going?” she asks, and after a lot of rustling and muffled shrieks, she speaks again, her voice sounding farther away and echoey. “You’re on speaker now, I guess.”

“Hi everyone,” Otabek says softly, and is bombarded with noise as his siblings all start talking at once.

“Beka it’s been like ten years-”

“I can’t believe you called _Rada_ instead of me first! I’m supposed to-”

“HI, OTABEK!”

Otabek chuckles and shakes his head a little. He curls up into the corner where he’s pushed his bed, brings his knees up close to his chest. 

“Hello everyone,” Otabek says into the noise. “If you’re wondering what we were talking about: I met someone who hates ballet as much as I do. We bonded over our hatred.”

“Oooooh,” three separate voices say together.

“Boy or girl?”

“What do they look like? Are you going to replace Jean as your best friend now? Because I told you--”

There’s another scuffle on over the phone, and a chorus of sad, faraway groans before Rada’s laugh sprinkles in over the speaker.

“Okay, that’s enough of that circus for now,” she says. “Are you having fun, Otabek?”

“I’m...learning a lot,” he says neutrally, because he’s not sure how to truthfully answer that question. 

Rada, in an  uncharacteristic moment of understanding, doesn’t push it for once in her life. They talk for nearly an hour, and then he spends another forty five minutes on the phone with Kelebek and Aydin, before Mama’s voice in the background forces them all to bed. 

 

*

Otabek doesn’t see Yuri until two weeks into summer camp. It’s late, and Otabek doesn’t notice until he’s made it back to his room, eaten dinner, and changed into his pajamas that he’s left his phone back at the skating rink. He pulls on his shoes and wonders if anyone will still be there, or if he’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get into the locker room for it. He’s never really been the type to break the rules, so it’s a new and exhilarating feeling to sneak out of the dorms (The older kids were allowed to live on the complex in shared dorms, instead of in separate housing like he had to last year). The shadows along the walls are just a little sharper, a little more menacing, when he passes through the hallways that night, and it only gets worse when he slips out of the building entirely and heads towards the lonely building that houses the skating rink. 

There’s a light on in the skating rink, and when Otabek gets there, he sees that the front door has a piece of black tape around the latch, so it doesn’t make a sound when he slips through. Otabek holds his breath and listens to the sound of his shoes on the linoleum floor, hoping it’s just a coincidence. But sure enough, as he goes down the hall, he hears the telltale sound of skates scraping against the ice, and against all of his better judgement, he peeks around the wall that separates the locker rooms from the skating rink, to see who’s here after hours. 

A skinny boy is spinning like a top in the center of the ice, dressed head to toe in black and causing him to stand out like a blotch of ink against the startling white of the ice. He transitions seamlessly into an Ina Bauer, and then makes a quick figure eight and leaps into a spin. Otabek counts three rotations in his toe flip, before he lands on the wrong edge of his blade and topples to the ice in a heap.

“Dammit,” a young voice snarls into the emptiness, and it’s then that Otabek recognizes him. 

Yuri Plisetsky stays as a heap on the ice, and after a long minute, he sighs, loud enough so the sound carries to Otabek. A sad sort of sound that no one can really bear to hear. Then, instead of standing, Yuri continues to lay on the floor, for long enough that Otabek thinks Yuri’s anger might be worth it if the kid needs actual medical attention and Otabek just left him there (long enough for Otabek to imagine that Yuri looked like an angel with its wings clipped, lying prostrate on the floor like that).

“Are you okay?” he calls out into the space, and Yuri’s head snaps up.

Even with meters between them, when his eyes catch Otabek’s his whole body feels electrocuted. Yuri scrambles to his feet and glides to the boards near Otabek, and he can see on Yuri’s face the moment he recognizes him. 

“Oh, you’re back,” Yuri says, scowling.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think you would be,” Yuri says. “You had to be with the beginners last year. I thought you’d realized you were terrible and given up.”

“I was put with the intermediate class,” Otabek says, then can’t help but add, “I’ve gotten better.”

“Oh yeah?” Yuri’s eyes try to bore holes into Otabek’s face. He has enough time to think that he’s never met someone quite so intense before he starts to speak again. “Show me.”

And Otabek doesn’t owe this kid anything; he’s just here to look for his phone in his locker and then call Mama before she gets worried. But Yuri Plisetsky is looking at him, and for once he doesn’t seem angry. So Otabek turns on his heel and heads to the locker rooms. He feels Yuri’s stare as a series of pinpricks along the back of his neck. 

His phone is sitting on the top shelf of his locker, but Otabek leaves it where it is and grabs his skates instead. He stomps back into the main rink, and he sees that Yuri hasn’t moved, and his eyes snap back to Otabek at the sound of him sliding off his skate guards. It fills him with a wild emotion that he can’t quite name. _Keep your eyes on me_ he wants to say, but instead he keeps walking, one foot in front to the other. 

Yuri’s eyes stay glued to Otabek up until he steps foot on the ice, then he skates to the other end of the rink and waves his hand dramatically. It’s a clear sign of _Go on, I’m waiting._

Otabek thinks through the practise routine Nathalie’s choreographed for him, the bare bones of what could be his short program when he debuts next year. It plays to his strengths, and the step sequence is more like a session in his kickboxing class than a dance routine. But it’s still not finished, so it clocks in at about 59 seconds. Before he knows it, he’s standing in the middle of the rink, realizing that they’ve never really choreographed an ending for it. Otabek turns to the last place he’d seen Yuri, only to find that the boy has skated over to him at some point in the routine, and is now less than a meter away from him. The look in Yuri’s eyes is inscrutable, but it’s better than all of the scowls Otabek has gotten from him before, so he keeps his mouth shut and waits. 

“Your doubles look like crap,” Yuri says, and the tone of his voice makes a blush rise up the back of his neck. 

“I know. The landings confuse me,” he admits, and for a second wonders if it was a mistake, if Yuri will take that admission and call him stupid, and say that he’s actually gotten worse from the last time. 

“I can almost do a triple axel,” Yuri says. 

“I saw.”

“No, you didn’t,” Yuri bites out, he scowls again, and although all that previous anger swims back up, it feels unfocused. He can tell that Yuri isn’t mad at him, specifically. “You saw me fall.”

Otabek keeps his mouth shut because, well, yes, that’s true. But most jumps are really falls, in Otabek’s opinion. A jump isn’t a jump just because it’s landed right. Intention counts. At least, that’s what Otabek thinks. When he starts competing, he bets the judges will think a bit differently. 

“I can show you something else, if you want,” Yuri says, pulling Otabek out of his head again. He’s still scowling, but a blush has started high on his cheeks. He turns and scowls at the far side of the rink. “But it’s not like I have to prove anything to you.”

“I would like to see,” Otabek says, and tries not to sound too excited. 

Yuri turns back to him, squinting like he can’t quite figure Otabek out. Otabek skates backwards until his back hits the boards, never taking his eyes off Yuri. After a second, Yuri shakes his head and starts doing a lazy lap around the center of the rink. He pushes off from the ice unexpectedly, and Otabek counts the three rotations in his head again. Yuri lands the salchow on a shaky leg, but doesn’t step out of it. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than Otabek can do. 

It’s more than Jean could do at his age, too. 

Yuri turns back to him, and Otabek can see a smile break free from his face, there and gone in a few quick, heart-stopping seconds. 

“I told you!” Yuri shouts, and Otabek smiles just a little helplessly back. 

“Yeah,” Otabek says, “You did. It was really cool.”

They stare at each other some more, and then Yuri smiles again. 

“Cool,” he says. “We should probably leave. I didn’t mean to stay this long.”

“Okay,” Otabek says, “I only came to get my phone.”

So they make their way off the ice side by side. From this close, Otabek can tell that Yuri is trembling ever so slightly, possibly from pushing his body too hard to do that triple salchow. If they were friends, Otabek might tell him not to push too hard, that the last thing he wants is an injury. 

But they aren’t really friends, are they? One civil conversation doesn’t quite make them friends, even if Otabek wants that, so instead, he stays quiet. He ignores the small hissing noise that comes out of Yuri when he hits the edge of the locker room doorway, and he ignores the livid bruise he can already see forming along Yuri’s ankle when he pulls off his skates and socks. 

“I guess I’ll see you around, Otabek Altin,” Yuri says. Otabek doesn’t think he’ll ever get over the way Yuri says his name. Like he means something, like he’s worth Yuri’s attention.

“Yeah,” Otabek says. 

And then Yuri slings his tiger-striped backpack over one shoulder, and is gone. 

Otabek walks back to his dorm room in somewhat of a daze, half convinced he’s just stepped out of a dream.

 

*

So really, that’s how it starts. His ballet instructor despairs at both his and Leo’s echappes, and it’s slightly more bearable when someone else is in on his discomfort. The days fly by in something like a blur, and Otabek doesn’t think he’s really learning anything until one day he finally lands his triple toe flip like it’s the easiest thing in the world. 

And then there’s Yuri. He shows up sometimes, at the end of his skating practise, and sometimes even at the older kid’s dorm building, where his reputation as an angry and deceptively powerful kicker has spread like wildfire. On these occasions, they mostly just sit around in a mostly awkward silence, Yuri glaring at anyone who so happens to cross their path. It makes Otabek wonder if Yuri’s the friend who normally lets the more talkative people do all the work, like himself.

Makes him wonder if Yuri has any friends at all, honestly.

Or: an angry spot of color against the dark night when Otabek is sitting on the cement steps of the building. Leo’s just left a few minutes ago, ready for “a shower that’ll use up all the hot water in the city, Otabek. It’s gonna be great.” And so Otabek is just thinking about going inside, maybe calling his sister, when he sees a telltale flash of bright blond hair.

Otabek is somewhat amazed that whoever it is that is in charge of Yuri’s wellbeing lets him out so late. He remembers very vividly how overprotective his host parents were last year.

“Hey, Altin, come on,” Yuri says, “We’re going to the park.”

“Are parks even open at this time of night?” Otabek says when Yuri just stares at him expectantly. Yuri rolls his eyes and hikes his leopard print backpack higher up on his shoulder.

“What does it matter?” Yuri says, and then waits just a beat more before spinning on his heel and walking off. 

After a few seconds, Otabek follows. He catches up to Yuri soon enough to see Yuri fight down the scowl at the corners of his lips. They walk side-by-side in relative silence for the fifteen minutes it takes to get to the small strip of grass that’s been labelled as the nearest park. The reach the jungle gym, and Yuri lights up when he catches sight of the slide.

“Come on,” Yuri says, and runs towards it. 

Otabek watches him go, somewhat bemused. Yuri, he’s noticed, is somewhat obsessed with proving to the world that he’s not a kid. He wouldn’t have thought Yuri would still want to do anything as seemingly childish as go down a slide. But he runs towards the slide and--and then he ducks under it for moment, almost diving into the sand there, and pops up on the other side, where he drags out two metal baseball bats.  

“Here,” Yuri says, and tosses one to him. It lands with a soft _thump_ in the playground sand. 

Otabek stares at it for a while, before turning to stare at Yuri some more. Yuri is already on the far side of the park, climbing up a tall cement wall to what looks like a vacant lot on the other side. Otabek picks up the bat and follows him. 

Yuri is a good climber, Otabek notes in a detached sort of way. Otabek himself scrambles up the two-meter-tall monstrosity with some difficulty, and Yuri sits at the top of it, watching him with unreadable eyes. He hops to the other side when Otabek reaches the top, so Otabek gets a moment to look down into the lot overgrown with yellowing grass and indistinct shrubbery. Piles of old garbage are also dotted along the area, old furniture and TVs and piles of broken wood and concrete slabs. Yuri makes his way over to a darkened pile, seemingly at random, swinging his bat as he goes.

“What are we doing here?” Otabek can’t help but ask, even though it’s made quite apparent by the way Yuri smashes his weapon into the side of an old, decaying dresser. 

“Stress relief,” Yuri says, and swings again. 

Otabek drops down from the wall and watches Yuri work. Bits of particle board break free from the dresser, and go flying into the street on the other side. Yuri looks up after a moment, frowns when he sees Otabek gaping at him like a fish out of water.

“Come on,” Yuri says again. “I thought you were cool.”

Otabek thinks of every adult who’s ever told him about peer pressure. He tightens his grip on the bat, focuses on the cool leather wrapped around hard aluminum.

“I’m not--really that stressed,” Otabek finally admits, to which Yuri simply scoffs.

“Whatever,” he says, and then goes back to pounding the dresser to bits. 

Yuri doesn’t push for Otabek to join in his minor acts of vandalism, but he doesn’t tell him to leave either. So instead, he sits cross-legged in the yellowing grass and watches. Yuri focuses mainly on the poor dresser, until the wood has splintered enough that he can kick through big chunks of the paneling. He has surprisingly good technique in his push kick, Otabek thinks. 

“You should lean back more when you kick,” Otabek can’t help but say after a good half-hour of watching. Yuri stops what he’s doing and snaps his attention back to Otabek. He tries not to blush. “You’ll get more power that way.”

“Show me,” Yuri says urgently. 

Otabek thinks about all the lectures he’s gotten on peer pressure again, and then stands, dusting his sweats off. 

“You’re doing a push kick,” Otabek says, coming up to stand beside Yuri. “It’s mostly used to get people away when you’re sparring. You, um,” Otabek puts his guard up, inches his left foot forward and places his weight mostly on the right foot. He taps his left knee. “You bring the knee up, like you were doing, then push out with the ball of your foot. It helps if you lean as far back as you can. You get more power that way.”

He demonstrates this on the poor, abused dresser, as slowly as he can manage. His foot easily breaks through a section of thin wood.

“Or,” he adds, “You can use your dominant foot. For more power.”

Otabek gets into position again--feet about shoulder width apart, left foot forward, fists up--then bounces on the balls of his feet to change the way his weight is distributed. He kicks out again, with his right foot this time, and punches a hole in the side of the dresser. He smiles as he tries to gracefully remove his foot this time.

“See?”

“Yeah,” Yuri says, and when Otabek turns to him again, he sees that Yuri is smiling again, an uninhibited, excited grin that Otabek hasn’t ever seen before. “Like this?”

He shifts his weight into a facsimile of Otabek’s stance. Otabek rakes his eyes up and down Yuri’s body, impressed by the way he’s managed to imitate it.

“Your feet are too far apart,” Otabek says, “Pick your heels up, just a little.” He taps the back of Yuri’s left shoe with his boot, gently. “Your left foot should be forward. It makes it easier to punch with your right hand.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Yuri says, but he moves his foot and adjusts his stance anyway.

“Do you see how it feels easier to be quick when you’re just on the balls of your feet?”

“No,” Yuri says, but there’s a glint in his eyes that Otabek thinks might mean he’s enjoying himself immensely. “So I lift the knee?”

“Yeah,” Otabek says, and goes through the movement in time with Yuri, kicking thin air while Yuri hits the dresser again. 

“So cool,” Yuri says under his breath. “What else can you show me?”

“Depends on how fast you learn,” Otabek replies.

Yuri’s grin is all teeth.

“You’ve got no idea what I can do.”

“Okay,” Otabek says, completely helpless. “Show me.”

 

*

They stay out so late that the shadows around them start to grow dim, and then they can start to see the buildings in the distance with the approach of dawn. Then, when they ignore that in favor of teaching Yuri how to move like a boxer, perfecting the duck-and-slide, the sky starts turning grey, then a bright, midnight-blue, then unmistakably, a pale pink.

It’s almost impossible to climb back up the concrete wall after they finally admit defeat, but when Yuri reaches the top, he holds out a hand and pulls Otabek up the rest of the way. Otabek doesn’t say thanks and Yuri doesn’t say you’re welcome, but both of the phrases hang in the air around them as they run back to camp. 

Otabek doesn’t think he’s had that much fun in years. 

“If there’s time before summer ends, we could find a boxing gym,” Otabek says lightly when they reach the dorms. “Normally you can get the first class free.”

“That would be great,” Yuri says, and Otabek doesn’t hear any sarcasm in his tone, so he smiles, a little shy. “We can ditch ballet. I’m better than anyone in my class and you hate it anyway.”

Yuri, he thinks when he dips behind a row of bushes and disappears from sight, is what adults would call a bad influence. Otabek rushes to his room and can’t actually be worried how ready he is to ditch, if it means he can see the easy way Yuri laughs again. 

 

*

 

Otabek leaves summer camp that year with Yuri Plisetsky’s phone number saved into his phone, and a strange sort of lightness in his belly. 

He doesn’t really expect much to come from their unlikely friendship, but then again, he never really expects much from the friendships he’s made, and those have somehow always worked out better than expected. In fact, he finds that he keeps in pretty constant communication with Leo after that summer. This makes Jean equal parts jealous and happy, but the two have gotten along pretty well the couple of times Otabek has put Leo on speaker, so he has high hopes.

He doesn’t expect much from Yuri, but what he gets is absolute silence. Which, in the larger scheme of things, is probably for the best. Yuri Plisetsky is set to become a force of nature when he enters the Junior League, and Otabek doesn’t need to be distracted from the need to beat him when he does so.

He doesn’t need the memory of Yuri’s shoulders shaking with laughter when he accidentally kicked Otabek so hard he’d lost his breath, either, but he lives with that memory locked away deep in his mind anyway. What he needs to do is focus on his skating, no matter how much the impressed tilt of Yuri’s head makes him want to disappear into kickboxing instead. 

So Yuri doesn’t try to contact him, and Otabek respects the silence, and keeps a distance.


	2. Just Give it Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where they are enemies for the better part of one season before deciding being friends is much more fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I say I set out to write a rivals AU and they start out as friends and become rivals and then go back to being friends??? Anyway the names of the chapters are from Jon McLaughlin songs because they were the original inspiration for the fic back when the mood was more intense, lifelong bitter rivalry than what ended up happening.
> 
> My BF says that I spend way too much time agonizing over chapter disparaties & lengths, so here is a much shorter chap than the first, with the promise of a 15k chapter upcoming (THIS IS WHY I WAS CRYING ABOUT IT). It's mostly written but has glaring timeline problems that I'll be hammering out in the next two weeks or so.

That year is Otabek’s first season competing. He does better than he’s been expecting, but not any better than what Madame Leroy thought he would over the season. He’s underestimated consistently that season, as he’s a year older than most kids debuting, and word spreads quickly that he’s got no classical ballet training. This, he knows, is entirely his fault. He hasn’t quite gotten the hand of talking with the press, no matter how easy their questions are for a preteen. 

His first competition is in the middle of nowhere, America, where Leo de la Iglesia is the only friendly face in a sea of kids who have already written him off. 

“There’s probably some classism there,” Leo mutters as they watch a pair of French boys sneer at them and veer in the opposite direction. 

“Because Kazakhstan has no reputation in skating?” 

“Yeah,” Leo says, but he has the grace to look uncomfortable about it. “No offense. Hey, but can you imagine them saying some dumb shit like: ‘oh, he’s from way out in the boonies, only _nobles_ should be allowed to skate.’”

“Nobles?” Otabek repeats, and Leo nods grimly back. 

“You know, like every anime ever?” he says. “You’re the anime protagonist, Otabek.”

“You’re crazy,” Otabek says, but it puts a smile on his face nonetheless. 

He comes in first in that competition, with Leo winning silver and a very confused looking sixteen year old from Sweden coming in third. 

“Whenever you get tired of JJ, you should try out Denver,” Leo says amicably at the airport the next day. He’s still wearing his medal over his sweater, and he smiles easily at Otabek’s muddled frown. 

“I’m always tired of Jean,” Otabek says. 

“The truth is revealed at last,” Rada says idly from where she’s pretending not to listen. 

“Well, I did just watch you down a whole lot of drugs just now, so I’m not sure how seriously to take what you’re saying,” Leo hedges, and runs a hand through his hair. 

“They’re not drugs. They’re medication. To keep me from puking the whole way to Canada. And I’m always serious,” Otabek adds very seriously, which makes Leo’s grin widen some more. 

“Sure,” he says, and then goes in for a hug before Otabek in his already lethargic state can’t dodge. “Don’t forget to call, man. See you at the GPF.”

“Maybe.”

*

He gets bronze in Italy next, and tries really hard to ignore the annoyingly smug looks on the Italian boy’s face when he steps off of his podium. He manages to scrape out a silver at his final GPF qualifying event, which does finally secure him a space at the Grand Prix, which is nice considering there is still a very small part of Otabek that still says (in a voice suspiciously familiar):

_If you’re not any good you should just go home._

So he keeps training, and he keeps getting better. It’s the only option, really. 

He earns silver at the GPF that year, with Jean standing center stage waving a gold medal around like it’s his birthright. Otabek burns with a tiny flame of jealousy that he’s reluctant to name. Jean is his best friend, after all and he shouldn’t feel like wanting to drop Jean to the ice if he says “It’s JJ Style!” one more time. 

And yet.

People start calling him a dark horse, which Rada finds hilarious and Otabek doesn’t really understand. But it’s all the same to him. He earned silver this year, and next year, he’ll earn gold. He has to. 

*

The season ends, and Otabek hires on Eliza Fumero as his coach, for no other reason than he wants to leave Canada.

“Whatever you think is best for you, Otabek,” Madame Leroy says when he tells her. “I’ve given you a strong foundation. I believe you’ll flourish in the US.” She pauses here, hesitates for a fraction of a second. “Have you told Jean?”

“Yes,” Otabek says, although he assumes that much would be obvious given Jean’s phenomenal sulk. “He’s not talking to me.”

Which surprises a laugh out of Madame Leroy. 

“He’ll come around,” she says. “He adores you, you know.”

Otabek blushes and doesn’t answer. But it’s true. Jean is inconsolable for another three and a half days, before he decides that distance won’t mean they’ll grow apart. Leo for his part, is excited, and Otabek suspects that it was Leo’s wheedling that finally gets through to Jean.

He also suspects Jean went to Rada for help with the notarized contract he makes Otabek sign, agreeing that he will call at least once a month while living in America, and that he’ll let Jean know if anything gets too weird out there. 

“You have to know I wouldn’t actually sign this contract,” Otabek sighs.

“You have to! You never know with those Americans,” he says with a completely straight face. 

“Jean, you were born in Wisconsin,” Otabek points out, but Jean shakes his head and frowns at him. 

“All the more reason to trust me on this,” Jean says, and Otabek has to leave before he does something stupid, like body slam his best friend for being insufferable. 

*

He and Rada decide to try driving to Denver, as there isn’t giant body of water to stop them. Well, it’s more that Rada decides she wants to drive, and Otabek decides that anything might be better than the motion sickness that comes with flight. Maybe.

“It’ll be great!” Rada says to a dubious Otabek one night. 

“It’s like, thirty hours,” he counters.

“Beka,” she says, “Come on. I just bought the Mazda. I’m not leaving it in Canada.”

Which means that he discovers one of the most important things of the year in the middle of May, when he and Rada have packed up the last of their things into Rada’s sporty green car and decided to road trip across the continent. This is: he does not get motion sick the entire time. He does preemptively takes his standard motion-sickness medicine and promptly falls asleep the second the hit the road, however, he wakes up six hours later to the sun setting and Rada singing to Queen at the top of her lungs. 

Rada throws a protein bar at his head without looking away from the road.

“We’re stopping in London for the night,” she says, tapping rhythmically against the steering wheel.

“I didn’t know the 401 took us to England,” Otabek says.

“You are such a gremlin,” she says fondly. “Go back to sleep.”

But he doesn’t. Instead, they bicker lazily for the next couple of hours, until they can find a hotel and rest.

They do it again the next day, but end up stopping in Chicago not four hours away because slogging through customs takes longer than either of them want it to. This means they hit Chicago at rush hour and Otabek decides they need to get off the interstate right now before Rada actually kills someone. 

Thursday they head out renewed, but stop at every couple of hours every time they pass a rest stop. Rada makes them takes selfies at each one to break up the monotony, according to her. 

“Also, if I don’t get out of that car I will seriously go out of my mind with boredom,” she adds and squishes Otabek against her to take an aggressive photo.

“You’re the one who wanted to roadtrip,” Otabek grouses. 

Rada retaliates by putting him in a headlock and rubbing a hand through his hair. One day he’ll be tall enough that she can’t do that as easily.

“I didn’t expect how awful it would be driving through fucking Iowa and Nebraska. Come on, let’s walk that stupid dog trail over there.”

“Isn’t it all the same?” Otabek asks. “You’re driving. You shouldn’t be looking at the scenery.”

“Oh, Bekatya,” Rada sighs and slings an arm over his shoulder. “When you start driving you’ll understand.”

It takes two days more than they’d expected, but eventually, they find their apartment--entirely empty except for two twin sized beds--at six o’clock on a Saturday night. Rada says she never wants to drive again and locks herself in one of the two identical rooms. Otabek has enough wherewithal to text a slew of people to let them know they’ve made it safely before he does the same. He’s adding people to the mass text with his eyes mostly closed and flings it to the other end of the bed without a second glance

This mass text is sent to: Mama, Dad, Kelebek, Aydin, Jean, Leo, Mme Leroy, Ms. Fumero, and, completely by accident, Yuri Plisetsky.

*

A response, almost hidden by the mountain of them he gets when he wakes, from Yuri Plisetsky, reads:

_didn’t know you were switching coaches. See you this season_

*

Yuri’s entrance into the Junior league causes quite a stir, as Otabek knew it would. He debuts with a program that some kids about to enter into seniors wouldn’t be able to skate competitively. Otabek, who had come in second at last season’s GPF to Jean’s gold, is ambushed at the start of the Trophee de France by the first of a series of reporters, all wondering what he thinks of the upstart.

“He’s a good skater,” Otabek says of Yuri with the woman’s recording device shoved into his face. He thinks about the way, two summers ago, Yuri had landed a triple salchow and how his body nearly collapsed under him from the exertion, and before he can help it, adds, “But he’s reckless, sometimes.”

“What makes you say that?”

Otabek takes a breath, wishing he could take the words back. But he’s here now, and Yuri _is_ reckless with his body; he pushes himself to his limit and then goes over it, and then gets mad when his body gives out on him. 

“He’ll do whatever it takes to be the best,” Otabek says, and leaves it at that. “No matter what.”

“Some would call that a positive trait,” the reporter says.

“Yes, some would.”

He spies Jean on the other side of the rink with his mother; he’s doing his terrible JJ-Style hands thing while someone points a video camera at him. So Otabek excuses himself and makes a beeline for the two of them. He sets the conversation out of his mind and instead focuses on his short program in a few hours.

*

“I thought you were friends with that kid,” Jean says the next day, idly scrolling through his phone while they wait for breakfast. 

It’s raining sluggishly in Paris today, and the sky is heavy with the promise of a storm. They’re inside Jean’s favorite Parisian coffee shop (that doesn’t mind two fifteen-year-olds loitering before the next leg of competition), and both his hands are wrapped around his cup as if to sap the warmth from it. It’s not too cold today, not like it was in Montreal, almost certainly not as cold as Almaty gets in early November, but just chilly enough to remind everyone that December is just around the corner. 

“What kid?” Otabek asks, unwrapping his scarf from around his neck when his own tea is set on the table. 

In response, Jean turns his phone to him, where two pictures have been juxtaposed next to each other on someone’s sports blog: one of Otabek landing his triple toe loop last competition and one of Yuri Plisetsky scowling, his arms crossed while a red-headed girl maybe Otabek’s age hugs him. The title under the pictures loudly speculates about his and Yuri’s CHILDHOOD RIVALRY? 

“Right,” Otabek says, and steals Jean’s phone from him to read the article (blurb, really; it’s not quite long enough for Otabek to consider it a proper article).

  
  
  


_Sources near to Yuri Mikhailovich Plisetsky say that the two’s rivalry stretches as far back as 2012 when they first met at a summer camp for talented figure skaters._

_When asked about the young Plisetsky’s odds for the season, Altin dismissed him as “reckless.”_

_“That boy taught Yuri all he knows about fighting,” a close friend of Mikhailovich said, who wished to remain anonymous. “They’ve been at odds ever since.”_

_Indeed, when asked for a comment, Yuri Plisetsky shouted a string of expletives his coach said was: “completely inappropriate for a thirteen-year-old to say, and you better not print them,” before rushing off to follow the young skater._

_Yuri Mikhailovich Plisetsky is 13, and his debut in the junior ISU this year has caused upheaval in the world of professional figure skating. His first competition at the Rostelecom cup brought him top points rivaled only by last year’s junior GPF champion, Jean Jacques Leroy from Montreal, and would look more at home on the leader board of the senior’s division. Top figure skater, Viktor Nikiforov, says young Yuri Plisetsky has more talent than he’s seen in years._

_Otabek Altin, 15, is speculated to be moving to the senior division this year. Is he running from young Yuri Plisetsky? Altin’s powerful form may have finally met its match, it seems! We’ll update this article with scores from today’s competition at the Trophee de France, where both Plisetsky and Altin are competing._  
  
  
  
“This person has obviously never written a news story before in their life. And, you know you should never trust Buzzfeed, Jean,” Otabek says, and slides his phone back across the table. 

“Sure,” he says, smiling while he pockets his phone. “But you didn’t see that kid’s face when that reporter got to him.”

“Did he look angry?” Otabek can’t help but ask. 

“Furious,” Jean says easily. “But surprised? Like I said, I thought you two were friends. The way he reacted, it looked like maybe he thought that too.”

“We are friends,” Otabek says, although now that he says it aloud, it sounds like a lie. “We haven’t spoken in two years, not since the last time I went to Yakov’s camp.”

“Do you keep up with social media?” Jean asks, which is a dumb question and he knows it, considering he knows Otabek doesn’t have any social media aside from his obligatory Facebook page that he scarcely visits. 

“No. Should I have?”

Jean shrugs and downs the rest of his drink, smiling as always.

“If I stopped talking to someone for two years, I don’t know if I would still consider them a friend,” he says, standing. 

“Jean, if you stop talking to someone for two minutes, you forget about them,” Otabek complains, and it makes Jean laugh. 

“Come on, we should get to the rink soon. 

*

Otabek as good as steals the gold at the Trophee de France, edging out Yuri by all of two points. So, Yuri Plisetsky ends up glaring to his left and, with Jean waving like a madman on his right, Otabek tries to ignore the waves of anger washing over him from the side. He endures the stream of photos with good grace, even when Jean grabs him by the neck and kisses him on the cheek like a crazy person. 

“It’s JJ-Style!” he says to a raucous of laughter from the reporters. 

Otabek surprises himself by sighing. 

“Please stop saying that,” he says while beside them, Yuri simultaneously growls, “Never say that again, oh my God.”

Otabek snaps his attention to Yuri, who is staring at him with eyes that Otabek should have remembered were so intense. The urge to say something, anything, is very strong, but Otabek doesn’t want the first real interaction he’s had with Yuri to be in front of a dozen cameras. The corners of his lips tilt up, just for a moment, but he sees the way Yuri’s eyes flick to the movement. He thinks he sees an answer in Yuri’s expression for a second, but then his face melts back into a scowl, and he storms away from the podium. 

“Out of my way, losers,” he says, and seems to make it a point to elbow Jean out of his way as he goes. 

There’s a chorus of reporters calling after Yuri, and then they turn almost as one back to Jean and Otabek. This time, Otabek keeps his mouth firmly shut. 

*

He gets back home, and Rada takes them to a fancy restaurant for winning gold. She’d offered to invite Leo, but Otabek has missed his sister more than he thought he would. He wants to spend the night just with her. This competition is the first where Rada had stayed home, and he would be lying if he said it hadn’t felt strange not to have her comforting presence by his side at the Kiss-and-Cry. 

He lasts through most of the dinner before Rada breaks and asks him about it. He’s pushing a slice of cheesecake around his plate mulishly when Rada sets her silverware down with a clatter. 

“Okay,” she says as if convincing herself of something. Otabek looks up and narrows his eyes, suspicious. “Let’s talk about what happened in Paris.”

“Nothing happened in Paris,” Otabek says automatically. 

“Right,” Rada replies easily. “Which is why the internet is saying you made a rival out there.”

“I didn’t make any rivals.”

“Okay.”

“The internet is full of all kinds of bullshit,” he tries.

“Sure,” Rada says, but continues to stare expectantly.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Otabek sighs after a painfully awkward moment. “Nothing happened, not really.”

Rada continues her surprisingly effective stance of staying silent, but only for long enough to let Otabek take another sullen bite of his cheesecake before she strikes again. 

“Yuri Plisetsky is that kid you met in summer camp a couple of years back, right?” she says quietly this time. 

Otabek sighs, just a little over dramatic. 

“Yes,” is all he can bring himself to say. 

“Okay,” she says again. Another silence. Then: “You were friends, right?”

“I think so.” Otabek thinks of the way Yuri had laughed what feels like a lifetime ago, when they’d stayed up all night learning how to kick and punch and keep his guard up. “I thought so.”

“JJ says you haven’t talked to him for a while.”

“I didn’t know you texted Jean,” Otabek accuses. 

“I needed spies while you were gone,” she dismisses easily. “I mean, I told you that I would let you be ‘independent’ and whatever, but I mean. I wasn’t just going to sit here waiting for you to come home, Bekatchka. I’m not Mama.”

“God, don’t call me that,” Otabek says, and lets the embarrassment pull him away from Jean’s betrayal. 

“Hmmmm,” Rada says, and then takes a big gulp from her glass of wine. After a moment of silence, she says, “You have his number right? You should text him.”

“He’s thirteen, Rada,” Otabek says. 

“No one’s suggesting you ask him out on a date. Although,” she starts and Otabek nearly chokes taking a drink of water. 

“I don’t want to _date him,_ ” he hisses and looks around to see if anyone’s been eavesdropping. 

“Sure, little brother,” Rada says, but it sounds like she doesn’t believe him. “I’m just saying, he gave you his phone number so you two could talk, and maybe you should try that. It was never this hard for you to text Leo or JJ.”

“Yuri is different,” Otabek says, although he can’t really explain why. 

“Right,” Rada says, but she does drop the topic, which Otabek counts as a win. 

When he locks himself up in his bedroom later that night, however, he really thinks about it. He thinks about Yuri’s scowl on the podium, and in contrast, his seldom-seen smile; and the perfect way he executed his triple axel in Paris. 

“Okay,” he tells the air, and pulls out his phone. 

_Hey,_ is all he can force himself to type out, and then closes his eyes while he taps the send button. 

It’s only after it’s been sent that he thinks to look up the time difference between them and curse his terrible timing. It’s almost 5 in the morning in St. Petersburg. There’s no way Yuri is going to want to answer him.

But, less than a minute later, his phone buzzes. 

**Yuri:**  
_Hey_

**Me:**  
_Congrats on the silver,_

Otabek stares at the message, and before he can talk himself out of it, adds, _I’m sorry about the weird rivalry thing._

**Yuri:**  
_Yeah, whatever_

**Me:**  
_I don’t want to be rivals_

This time, it takes longer for Yuri to respond; it’s almost midnight before his phone buzzes again. 

**Yuri:**  
_I don’t either_

**Yuri:**  
_Don’t think that means I won’t crush you at the GPF this year._

**Me:**  
_Obviously_

**Yuri:**  
_OK. As long as that’s settled. Your FS wasn’t complete shit, I guess_

Otabek sends him back a thumbs up emoji because he’s not quite sure how he feels about that (which is a lie; he knows exactly how he feels about that, but he’s choosing to ignore the weird little flip in his chest, for now). He goes to sleep shortly afterwards; it feels, strangely, like a weight he hadn’t noticed has been suddenly lifted from his shoulders. 

*

“Senior division is so hard, Otabek,” Leo whines one day halfway through practice. He managed a bronze at Skate America this year but hadn’t placed at the Rostelecom Cup, and so he’s back in Denver at loose ends. It’s lunch break, and since their home rink is right in the middle of the mall, Otabek and Leo have claimed a table at the farthest corner of the food court (across from the _Salat_ because it doesn’t smell as much as other places and won’t tempt them to overeat). Leo sighs dramatically and drops his head into the crook of his elbow. “You were right to stay in juniors for another year.” 

“I’ve got to deal with Jean,” Otabek argues, and after a second of thinking, Leo agrees that it’s Otabek who has the worse end of the deal here.

“But, you know he only stayed in the junior league because you didn’t want to get into seniors yet,” Leo says. 

Otabek blushes a bit, rubs at the back of his neck.

“You don’t know that,” he says.

“Otabek, have you seen that terrible think piece ESPN 2 did on him? He goes on for like five solid minutes about how _symbolic_ it was for the two of you, how it would cement you as _brothers_.”

Otabek groans in the back of his throat, and Leo’s head snaps up with a grin on his face.

“He is such a trash fire,” Leo says, and Otabek is forced to agree. “But I guess he’s our trash fire, so there’s that.”

“Yeah,” Otabek says, and then nearly jumps out of his chair when his phone buzzes. 

He’s expecting it to be another meme from Jean, and nearly spills his drink when he sees that Yuri’s texted him again.

“What have we said about face-journeys with no context,” Leo says mildly. 

“I just got a text from Yuri Plisetsky,” Otabek says.

“Ohhhhhhhh,” Leo replies, and then again, “Ohhhhhhhhh. He went to camp with us a million years ago, right? You two were, like The Bad Boy Duo. Everyone was afraid of you.”

“They were not,” Otabek snaps, already blushing. 

“They totally were,” Leo says stubbornly. He flicks one of the napkins across the table towards him; they both watch as it misses and flutters to the floor anticlimactically. “I remember because you made me cool by association. I was that guy who Otabek always hung out with when he wasn’t breaking things with that Plisetsky kid.”

“That was one time!”

“Wait,” Leo says, and sits up in his seat. His eyes have nearly doubled in size, somehow. “Wait, wait, wait. You two actually went out and like, broke stuff? Vandalized private property and all that? I thought those were just rumors! Holy shit, Otabek, you were way cooler than I deserved at thirteen.”

“We went to a vacant lot one day and swung baseball bats at some furniture,” Otabek says, and fiddles with the straw to his drink. “It really isn’t as cool as you’d think.”

“Uh huh,” Leo says, still gaping at Otabek. “Man, you’re probably still too cool to be associated with me. How did you to get to be rivals again? It’s been all over the internet.”

“You look like a fish, Leo,” Otabek says, rolling his eyes and then turning his attention back to his phone. 

**Yuri:**  
_I just had to sit through half an hour of that awful interview JJ Leroy did with espn2 how are you even friends with that walking disaster_

**Me:**  
_I collect walking disasters. I adopt them or something_

**Yuri:**  
_I feel so sorry for you_

**Me:**  
_thx_

“That is a hell of a smile you’re wearing for someone who claims to be your rival,” Leo observes suddenly. 

Otabek looks up suddenly, caught, and sees Leo’s got a self-satisfied grin plastered across his face. 

“It’s not--” Otabek starts, but Leo puts his hands up and laughs.

“It’s okay man, I get it,” he says, “The Bad Boy Bros need their secrets too.”

“And you say Jean is the trash fire.”

“Oh, Burn,” Leo says quietly, and Otabek shakes his head as he leaves. 

He wonders what it says about him that he does seem to collect human disasters. Yuri doesn’t respond to that, but it is after nine over in Russia, and he guesses Yuri probably has to get up just as early as Otabek to start his training routines. Otabek himself rarely stays up past ten anymore. 

*  
**Yuri:**  
_Out of curiosity, what would you say if we were, theoretically, rivals?_

The message stares up at Otabek, sent about three hours ago when he’d left for kickboxing. It must have been close to midnight in St. Petersburg when he’d sent it, so it was probably too late to ask Yuri what he was talking about. Otabek drops his bag by the door, and makes a beeline straight for the shower, neatly sidestepping Rada where she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table. 

“There’s leftover takeout in the fridge when you’re done,” she says.

“You know I can’t have Chinese,” Otabek grouses. “Every time we get it, I have to run another three miles because of how much I overeat, Rada.”

“Sounds like a personal problem!” she calls after him when he shuts the door to his room. 

So he takes a shower, and he resolves to do some stretching before bed while he's at it. He ends up texting Yuri because apparently he can’t go more than a couple of hours without it, nevermind that Yuri is probably mostly asleep.

**Me:**  
_I mean we already said we aren’t rivals. What’s this about?_

And surprisingly, Yuri texts him back quickly. Otabek wonders just what Yuri might be doing at three in the morning. 

**Yuri:**  
_well we’ve been trending since the trophee de France. My coach/choreographer/everyone thinks it's a good like, publicity thing_

Otabek blinks at his phone while stretching his calves. 

**Me:**  
_are you saying you want to what? Fake a rivalry?_

**Yuri:**  
_OK so I can tell you’re judging me from wherever the fuck you are in America but I swear it’ll be good for you too. Your fans are already in a frenzy defending you_

**Me:**  
_I have fans?_

Which causes a long enough silence from Yuri that Otabek figures he’s gone to sleep. He thinks this up until Otabek is stretching in as close to a split as he can manage and his phone buzzes with an incoming call next to his ear. Otabek answers without looking, since it’s about the time when Dad usually calls, who likes to catch up before going into work.

“Do you honestly, actually believe that you don’t have fans?” Yuri’s voice says on the other end of the line, sounding just a touch manic, and Otabek shoots up so fast he nearly strains something. 

“Shit sorry, what?” 

“Otabek,” Yuri says, and how is it even possible to be able to hear the scowl in his voice? “You know you have fans, right?”

“Yes, obviously,” Otabek replies, and then looks around his room for a safe place to sit that’s not covered in dirty laundry. “I just meant. Like crazy intense fans like JJ’s girls or like, the way all of Japan is ride or die for Katsuki Yuuri in seniors.”

“Otabek,” Yuri says again, and this time he sounds more skeptical than angry. “You have absolutely rabid fans. They are--well. Okay, they’re not as bad as JJ’s, but definitely up there. It’s like you don’t have any social media.”

“I… Don’t?” Otabek says and then has to wait a very long time before Yuri replies. 

“I’m sorry,” Yuri says quite reasonably. “I might have just hallucinated. You didn’t just say that in the year of our lord 2k15, you do not have any social media. Are you secretly like, forty?”

“I have a Facebook page,” Otabek defends, even though he knows that Facebook barely even counts anymore these days. 

“That barely even counts,” Yuri says. 

“I’m sorry?”

Yuri scoffs. 

“Whatever. I’ll send you some links. What I mean is that we could milk this rivalry thing. I’m already gaining a following of my own, and this feud has gained me like, a thousand followers since Paris.”

Otabek looks at his dresser, where the Trophee de France medal is sitting in a pile next to his socks. He makes a mental note to give it to Rada, who is making some sort of shrine in the living room for all of his medals. Then, he lets his gaze wander over to the wall with all of the pictures he’s collected of him, Jean, and Leo over the years. Wonders what it would have looked like to add a few of a certain blonde kid to the collage as well. 

“If that’s what you want,” Otabek finally says. 

“Awesome,” Yuri says, and at least he sounds happy about it. “Just wait, I’ve got a surprise for the GPF that will make everyone go nuts. It’ll be like, a petty spite thing, and then you can be all unimpressed and then Yuri’s Angels will--”

“Yuri’s Angels?” 

“That’s what my fans are calling themselves,” Yuri says. Otabek hears a deep breath over the receiver. “I have fans, Otabek. Isn’t that the coolest thing?”

“I guess?” Otabek says, somewhat bewildered. 

“It’ll be great, Otabek,” Yuri says, with just the slightest manic edge creeping to his voice again. “You’ll see. We’ll rock the GPF. We’ll be bigger than the TSwift/Kanye feud.”

“Hey, Yuri, quick question,” Otabek says casually. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Fuck you,” Yuri snarls, and Otabek imagines an embarrassed blush crossing his face before the line goes dead. 

*

The next morning, Otabek wakes to a series of texts from Yuri. All of them are links to blogs and Twitter accounts and long Tumblr pages, where his fans (mostly young girls) have written exposes on his form, theories on his personal life, and even long comparison pieces between him and Jean. Many of those had eventually claimed that _Otabek was the better skater_ , which, well. Otabek has never once thought that in his life, and to see someone else write essentially a three-page essay on why they thought it was JJ who was emulating Otabek’s style… 

_Think about it,_ one blogger had written at the end of her piece, _JJ is so adamant about saying he’s so original. It’s “JJ style,” like he’s come up with it all on his own. But I think he’s compensating. He knows that all of his moves are nothing but inaccurate copies of Altin’s techniques, and he’s desperate to prove that it belongs to him. But we’ve figured out the truth! We won’t let Otabek Altin's successes be drowned out by the louder, more obnoxious skaters!_

Right. 

He doesn’t quite know how to feel about it. 

“Rada,” he says that morning over his oatmeal. “Rada, did you know I have a…a...a fan following?”

Rada makes a scoffing sound in the back of her throat while she turns the stove top up to high. 

“Duh,” she says. “You can pretty much blame Kelebek for that. She’s been live-tweeting every performance of yours since your debut into juniors. She made the official Otabek Altin fan page on like, every social media account. She’s very proud of her green checkmark.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Otabek says, looking into his oatmeal as if it might hold all the answers. 

Rada taps him on the head affectionately as she passes him. 

“I know, Beka. This is what you get for not being on Twitter.”

Otabek takes another bite of his oatmeal, and against his better judgment, opens Twitter up on his phone browser and looks it up. 

*

There’s a youtube video that starts trending, which Kelebek is quick to send him the link to, which is an interview with Yakov Feltsman. All four of his students are hanging around in the background, each feigning disinterest as if they were at a modeling photoshoot instead. Otabek spies Yuri hiding somewhere behind Georgi Popovich and Mila Babicheva. 

“No comment,” Yakov is saying. “All of my skaters are in top form. They can’t afford any distractions right now. Next question.”

“For Yuri Plisetsky, sir,” a young woman in the crowd starts. Yuri’s head snaps up, and he visibly shoulders past the two older kids to step out of the shadows. “Do you have anything to say regarding the supposed disagreement between you and other skaters in your bracket?”

“We hardly have time to go over childish bickering—" Yakov starts, but doesn’t finish, as Yuri takes the moment to bodily jump in front of him.

“He’s no match for me,” Yuri proclaims arrogantly to a sea of cameramen. “Certain people can talk all they want, but the next time they see me, they are gonna eat those words. Just wait to see who’s reckless and immature when I’m beating him at the Junior GPF.”

And, because Yuri is nothing if not a drama queen, he takes that as his last words and storms off back into whatever building they were standing in front of. Otabek half listens to the next few seconds of the clip before he gives in and texts Yuri.

**Me:**  
_I never called you immature_

**Yuri**  
_I know it was for the #drama_

“Right. The Hashtag Drama,” Otabek mumbles aloud, and wonders, momentarily, just what exactly he’s let himself get dragged into.

*

Yuri Pliesetsky lands a shaky quad salchow at the junior GPF in his short program. Otabek, like almost everyone around him, is speechless. He’s in the waiting room with three of the other skaters, watching on one of the flat-screens when it happens. He’s a little shaky on the landing, and when he comes to a stop, Otabek can see the tremble in his legs that he guesses are begging for him to drop to the ice. 

“That was amazing,” a young Chinese skater says next to him. 

“It won’t count,” another boy says. “We’re not allowed to do quads in juniors. It’s not safe.”

“He’s thirteen,” someone else says. “It’s not actually possible.”

“Obviously, it is,” Otabek says faintly, watching the way coach Yakov yells silently at Yuri as they make their way to the kiss-and-cry. Yuri is buried in his phone, ignoring everything Yakov might be telling him. 

Otabek’s phone buzzes in his pocket. 

**Yuri:**  
_Try to top that_

Otabek doesn’t answer, but the funny swooping feeling in his gut lasts him all the way through his own program. 

It is, naturally, all that the media can talk about for the rest of the tournament. Otabek gets cornered at the end of his program about it. 

“What do you think of Mr. Plisetsky performance?” one reporter asks. 

Otabek tries really hard not to stare at the little red light on the man’s camera while he answers. 

“It wasn’t awful,” he says carefully. 

“What do you have to say about the feud between the two of you?” he asks again as if sensing blood. “Earlier today, Plisetsky intimated that his performance would be a direct response to your allegations at the Trophee de France.”

“All I said in Paris was that I thought he might be reckless,” Otabek hedges. “Today’s performance doesn’t change that. He knew he wouldn’t get full points for that quad, but he did it anyway.”

That’s all the man can get out of Otabek, however, before another swarm of reporters ambush him and start asking questions over one another. Otabek pushes his way through them and looks around for Rada. 

“Hey, Altin!” Yuri calls from the nearest exit. He’s slouching against the whitewashed wall, hood to his Team Russia jacket pulled low over his head. Otabek thinks that all that’s missing from the scene is a dramatic guitar riff. “Ready to eat my dust today?”

“You wish, Plisetsky,” Otabek says, and watches the lightning-quick way Yuri smiles at him. Somehow, he thinks it might be more satisfying than any of Jean’s easy grins. 

Both Yakov and Rada find them then, and while Rada pulls Otabek away by the back of his sweater like a lion with its cub, Yakov places a hand between Yuri’s shoulder blades and all but pushes him away. 

“What are you doing?” Rada hisses into Otabek’s ear as they pass by a group of reporters and fans on their way out. “I thought you said you’d talked it out.”

“We did,” Otabek says, then shrugs. “It’s more fun this way.”

“Since when have you _ever_ cared about fun?” she snaps, but the angry, defensiveness to her shoulders melts away, so at least he knows no one is going to die today. 

*

So it goes that Yuri Plisetsky is standing at the top of the podium of the junior GPF, thirteen and beaming like he could take on the world. Otabek stands to his left with the silver around his neck, and to their right, Guang Hong Ji, the Chinese skater. Otabek effects a scowl for the cameras and suffers through the endless stream of photographs, all while a strange sense of pride starts to grow in him. He’s…proud to see Yuri standing at the center of the podium; happy to see him to his right as if that’s where Yuri belongs. It’s a strange and worrying emotion to have, especially considering Otabek is actually supposed to compete against the kid. 

And yet. There is Yuri Plisetsky, now taking off his gold medal and clenching tightly while he raises his fist in the air triumphantly. Guang Hong Ji on the other side is smiling shyly at the cameras, and Otabek resists the powerful urge he gets to mimic Yuri’s stance. Instead, he tugs on the hem of Yuri’s jacket, just hard enough to get the attention of the press. 

“Congrats,” Otabek mutters, taking care to move his lips as little as possible. Then he clears his throat, and when he speaks again, he makes sure his voice carries more than he would normally like. “You’re really soaking up that limelight, huh?”

“You bet, Altin,” Yuri says viciously, and his expression somehow manages to convey a scowl and a grin at the same time. Otabek isn’t quite sure how he manages it. “I’ll do it again next year too."

“I’ll be playing with the big kids next year,” Otabek says before he can stop himself. “Have fun with the babies.”

Which pulls an actual scowl to Yuri’s face. And, yeah, Otabek gets now why people say these kinds of things; there’s a certain kind of thrill to knowing that with a single phrase, he can flip someone’s mood so totally. Otabek smirks, and he knows what it’ll look like to everyone watching, what it’ll look like in the photos when they get posted online: Yuri Plisetsky, GPF gold medalist, scowling at Otabek. And Otabek, who has never once had a discernible expression for the photographers, now openly smirking like a cat that’s gotten the cream. 

It’s possibly the greatest victory he’s had yet. 

*

**Yuri:**  
_Nice touch with the seniors jibe thing_

**Me:**  
_Thanks. I thought it might have been too much_

**Yuri:**  
_Nah. Yuri’s Angels ate that shit up. It was great_

**Me:**  
_Okay. And for the record, you skated great today_

**Yuri:**  
_Duh. I won gold, remember ;) you weren’t awful too, I guess_

**Me:**  
_thx I feel so special_

*

Otabek takes to stalking his sister’s fan page. His reasoning is that it’s only fair since Kelebek went and created an entire Fandom around Otabek’s skating. She and her followers (22k and counting) have a lot to say about his and Yuri’s exchange after their short programs. Before today, Otabek had never experienced a Twitter fight in real time, but as he watches, several of Kelebek’s followers (Otabek’s fans, but he’s trying not to think about that for his own sanity) start arguing with Yuri’s Angels. 

It’s… Intense, to say the least. 

**Me:**  
_having fans is weird_

**Yuri:**  
_welcome to the real world, Otabek. It only took you your entire time in juniors to get there._

**Me:**  
_I had fun. I mean, a weird fun, but it was fun, right?_

**Yuri:**  
_Yeah. Being a petty jerk is actually lots of fun when you’re not actually pissed at the person._

**Me:**  
_cool._

**Yuri:**  
_Cool._

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @alpha-hydra!!


	3. Not Making Mistakes (Please don't be fake)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Otabek moves to Detroit. Several things happen in the motor city, which include but are not limited to:  
> -Phichit Chulanont being a force of nature  
> -Otabek finally coming to terms with his crush  
> -JJ is the most embarrassing excuse for a human on the entire planet  
> -Boxing and skating, oh my!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey this was supposed to go out a couple of weeks back, but it turns out starting a new job that is immediately shitty is, well, pretty shitty. Anyway here is another 16k of apparently the slowest burning slowburn I have ever written.

For the first few months of the new year, the world feels like it’s going according to some frustrating, vast, cosmic plan. Otabek lands a quad salchow once on the last day of practise until February, and then nearly breaks his wrist trying it again the when the skating rink is full of pedestrians. He spends entirely too much time combing through Twitter for anything from Yuri, and then does the same on Instagram when he discovers how much more often Yuri posts there. He goes back to Denver, has a long conversation with Rada, and then with his boxing instructor, and then with his coach, and then he and Rada have packed their bags again.

“One day I’ll learn to get an apartment that’s already furnished,” Rada mumbles, as she scrolls through Craigslist on her phone with a scowl.

“Leo says if you leave your free stuff on the sidewalk, people will take it home.”

“Leo obviously doesn’t know there are laws against illegally dumping, does he,” Rada shoots back, annoyed.

(But, two days later Rada gets a friend of hers to drive her and their couch, coffee table, and nightstand to the University district, where she leaves the whole getup arranged neatly in a park. Otabek knows because he was the one who made the cutesy sign with “ ♥ FREE STUFF ♥ ” written in pink bubble lettering because his penmanship was always better than Rada’s.

“Not a word, little brother,” she says, but she does send him a picture of the whole thing, so he can’t be too upset.)

He fills up a notebook with ideas for his next year, with lists and lists of criteria for when his next coach will start choreographing his routines, with names of songs he hears on Spotify that he’s charmed by. He lies and says he’s started looking for a new coach, and avoids that entirely for weeks.

They pack up what little they ever keep and then flee the states for home. Oabek doesn’t quite understand the constricting feeling in his chest when their plane finally lands down in Almaty, somewhere in between painful and joyous. Kelebek is waiting for them at baggage claim and she launches herself at Otabek at Mach 3 when he catches her eye.

“Welcome home,” she whispers in his ear, and the squeezing feeling in his chest only gets worse.

He doesn’t know what to say, but luckily, when he thinks _This isn’t really home anymore_ , Rada is there, wringing an arm around both of their necks until they overbalance and nearly topple to the floor.

“REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD,” Rada half-sings, half shouts into their ears, and both Kelebek and Otabek groan simultaneously.

“You are so embarrassing,” Kelebek grumbles, and Rada laughs like a crazy thing and refuses to let either of them go.

When they finally escape from Rada’s clutches, Kelebek tells them she’s ready to take them home, and holds out a ring of keys, proudly.

“Mama let me drive here to pick you guys up,” she says.

Rada snorts.

“Right,” she says, “There’s no way in hell that I’m letting you drive me anywhere, Kielbasa.”

“Don’t be such a grandma, you radish,” Kelebek snaps back. “I graduated from permit to actual license like two years ago.”

“Nope. Don’t care,” she says, and snatches the keys out of Kelebek’s hands.

They bicker and fight all the way to the car, and it’s not until they almost dissolve into actual wrestling, here in a parking lot on a sunny day, that the tight feeling in his chest starts to unwind itself. Maybe Almaty doesn’t feel like home, yet, but the people here certainly do. That’s got to be enough.

*

“So,” Kelebek says a month and a half later. Currently, Otabek is lying sprawled out on the living room couch, trying to make it feel like home. Rada is in the kitchen, arguing in a non confrontational way with Dad. “So.”

“So,” Otabek parrots, because he can tell that this is going to be A Talk, and he really isn’t in the mood for it.

“When did you start hating on Yuri Plisetsky, exactly?” Kelebek says, ruthless as always.

Otabek shrugs and doesn't answer, clicking through apartment listings idly on Rada’s computer. They’re supposed to start looking for an apartment in Detroit when Otabek starts with his new coach; after spending four solid days with little sleep researching all sorts of coaches that he thinks would work well with him, he’d eventually settled on Celestino Cialdi. Celestino is Italian, and has been gaining a reputation because of his star pupil, a Japanese skater who has been steadily rising in the ranks. Otabek thinks it must mean something if Katsuki Yuuri has packed up his whole life and moved to the United States from Japan. After a series of emails, Otabek, Rada, and Celestino had drafted a contract. It’s been the first contract Otabek has had any say in, and he’s surprised by how easy it is to negotiate terms. He’d always thought it was impossibly complex.

At any rate, Otabek is moving to Detroit in June, and Rada is being no help whatsoever.

Rada, being the terrible adult that she is, has left the task of securing an apartment to Otabek, claiming it’ll be good practise for when he’s finally abandoned by her. Kelebek is staring at him like she doesn’t quite know who he is, which is actually really painful if he thinks about it for too long, so he keeps pretending to be interested in studio apartments and their weird 3d layouts for a while.

Here are the facts:

Kelebek is Otabek’s closest confidant. They are twins in name and spirit, if not birth, and there was a time when they were all but attached at the hip. How could he keep a secret from her?

She also happens to run Otabek’s “Official” Twitter fan page. Would it be cheating to tell her that him and Yuri aren’t actually feuding? Would she tell everyone? It would seem to Otabek that them actually being friends and pretending to be rivals would be better gossip, really. He wants to ask Yuri about it, but then everyone in his family is a snooping bastard, and soon enough Kelebek would discover Otabek’s new friend. Which would leave him back at square one, right?

“I thought you were like, obsessed with him,” she continues meanly while Otabek deliberates, watching his face carefully. “Me and Rada thought you were in love with him.”

“I’m NOT in love with him!” Otabek says, more loudly than he’d really like. That, at least, gets him to shove Rada’s laptop away defensively. His traitorous body starts to blush fiercely at that, and it makes Kelebek grin like a maniac. 

“So defensive, Beka,” Kelebek says with a grin, and then she pulls her phone out and snaps a picture of Otabek’s scowl. “It’s going on twitter,” she says.

“Beka,” Otabek whines, and she shrugs, still grinning.

“Sorry, the fans need updates,” she says, not sounding sorry at all.

“We hardly even talk,” Otabek lies, and is betrayed by his phone buzzing loudly on the coffee table. “Shut up.”

**Yuri:**  
_Moscow sucks_

Otabek wonders what Yuri is doing in Moscow, until he remembers from an old wikipedia article he’d read that Yuri’s family is originally from Moscow. He very desperately wants to ask Yuri all about it, except that Kelebek is staring at him with eyes that never miss a thing, so he sets his phone on the couch by his thigh, as casually as he can manage, and goes back to looking at apartments.

*

**Me:**  
_what’s so bad about Moscow?_

He sends the message in the middle of the night when he’s sure the prying eyes of his sisters won’t be able to steal the message away from him, half afraid that Yuri will have already gone to sleep. But his phone buzzes a few minutes later. Otabek releases a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

In response, Yuri sends him a dark photo of an abandoned looking street, with a single lamp post across the narrow street as the only source of light. There’s a dark splash across the ground, where it looks like it might have just finished raining.

 _Nothing to do_ Yuri texts back.

In response, Otabek snaps a picture of his backyard, which is brightly lit by strings of fairy lights. The porch is bright but not overly so; a picturesque quality that Otabek has not noticed until now. Rada’s shadow mixes with the forms of three of her old friends, who have been sitting outside drinking since the early hours of the evening.

**Me:**  
_At least you don’t always have a million people over_

To which Yuri responds by sending him a picture of a small, empty living room, lit only by a standing light by the door. Then an empty kitchen, unlit but for the light spilling in from the living room. Then a dark and ominous stairway. Then, a narrow hallway with exactly three doors, two of which are firmly shut. A single, lopsided picture sits on the wall between what Otabek would guess are the two bedrooms, but there’s not enough light from the overhead lamp to make out what is in the photo. Soon after that, a text.

 **Yuri:**  
_I wouldn’t mind having a few people over_

Otabek stares at that message for a very long time. He keeps writing out responses and then erasing them, fearing they are too judgemental or too desperate or even too mocking. He wants to ask why Yuri goes to Moscow if there’s no one there to spend time with. He, impossibly, wants to ask Yuri to Almaty, to spend a summer surrounded by Otabek’s large and crazy family, to see him get reduced to tears by the force of his laughter. He wants Yuri to not be so alone all the time.

Eventually, what he decides to send is a text that reads: _You seem to be alone a lot._

It’s vague, and a little forward; Otabek realizes as soon as he’s sent it. He’s busy languishing over a way to change the tone of the sentence when Yuri texts back.

 **Yuri:**  
_maybe I like being alone._

**Me:**  
_Maybe_

It’s all Otabek can send back without feeling like he’s overstepped. And even that is, apparently, too much for Yuri. He doesn’t text back.

*

One night, Otabek wakes up in darkness, in the in-between times where morning and night seem to meld into one another. He goes from deep sleep to wide awake in the span of a blink, and spends a few minutes staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom for a very long time. At eight years old, he and Dad had stuck glow in the dark stars up on his ceiling, in the form of the winding constellation of scorpio. It feels like being transported through time staring up at the dimly glowing form of it now, eight years later.

He thinks about the dream he’s just had, a soft, fuzzy sort of dream where nothing has a hard edge. A streak of gold moving idly along a white expanse, a bouquet of roses sitting on a bench somewhere. He only half remembers the tune that was playing, but vividly remembers the way his own feet had performed a triple toe loop with refined ease.

He thinks he remembers a splash of sunrise, a streak of green.

He thinks he remembers skating, and in the background, a happy, tinkling laugh that he knows is coming from Yuri Plisetsky, even though he never sees the boy in his dream.

Otabek gets up and searches his room for his old, abused notebook in the dark, and writes down as much as he can remember, before he can stop himself.

It’s the first time he’s ever considered choreographing something on his own. He’ll eventually have to discuss it with Celestino, obviously, as he’s not sure of the man’s policy with that sort of thing, and it hadn’t been something Otabek thought to ask when he’d originally hired the man.

It’s three in the morning, on a Thursday in the middle of April, and Otabek has sketched out the beginning of what will become his short program, as well as started a habit that will last well into his professional career.

(Generally, of coming up with choreography in the middle of the night, but more specifically of dreaming of people on the ice and writing down the inspiration he gets from it.

And a habit of dreaming of Yuri and forgetting, too.)

*

A week later, he texts Jean.

 

**Me:**  
_I’m choreographing my own program this year_

Jean responds by sending him three thumbs up emojis and a picture of his JJ-Style hands.

**Me:**  
_I’m deleting you_

**Jean:**  
_D: D: D: D:_

*

Spring melts into summer in one long exhale, and before Otabek knows it, he’s packing his luggage again and trying to ignore the way Aydin and Zerrin look at him like they might never see him again.

“It’s really not fair at all,” Zerrin says. “You spend all this time with Rada and only a few months here at home.”

“Nothing’s stopping you from coming with us, Zeranya,” Rada coos. She scoops her up and sets her on top of the pile of clothes slowly growing over her luggage. “I’m sure you’ll fit in my carry-on.”

“If she gets caught by customs, they’ll throw her in the incinerator,” Otabek says very seriously. He stares down at his little sister solemnly, watches the way her eyes grow round as saucers. “They have a special one just for stowaways.”

“Customs doesn’t incinerate people!” Zerrin insists, although she doesn’t sound too sure of herself.

“Don’t worry little sister,” Rada says, winking at Otabek. “They’ll let you bypass the incinerator if you become a citizen.”

“I don’t want to be an _American_!” Zerrin exclaims, outraged. She hops off the bed in a huff and disappears from Rada’s bedroom to Otabek and Rada’s laughter. “You two are the worst.”

The two of them laugh until they hear Zerrin’s stomping fade away. Then, it’s just the faint sounds of some pop song playing from Rada’s phone that keeps them company.

“What do you think would happen in a world where Mama actually let Zerrin come to Detroit with us?” Rada asks as she’s folding up one of her sweaters.

“We’d probably get nothing done ever,” he admits. “She’d be so spoiled.”

“She’s already spoiled,” Rada says, but she’s smiling when she says it.

“True,” Otabek replies with a tilt to his lips. “She’d hate it there.”

“Probably,” Rada says with a shrug. “Her English is still terrible and all of her friends are here. Plus, I doubt Kelebek or Aydin would ever forgive us if we took Zerrin to America and left them here in the mainland.”

“We could all move to America,” Otabek says, only half joking.

He spends a few minutes getting lost in the fantasy; their family of seven upending their entire lives to move to the bustle of Downtown Detroit. He imagines it somewhat like the tight, metropolitan area of Montreal, a large sprawling neighborhood which somehow retains a coziness, like a sleepy village. He thinks of the apartment he and Rada shared in Colorado, and tries for a minute to imagine three other kids haunting the living room: Kelebek wrapped up in her phone, while Aydin plays a video game on their tiny TV.

“They’d hate it,” Rada says after a minute.

“Yeah,” Otabek agrees.

“Rada,” Mama calls from across the hallway, in the careful voice that they’ve all come to learn means to tread with caution. “Did you tell Zerrin that the Americans were going to come take her away and throw her in a fire unless she gets citizenship?”

The both look up at the ominous sounds of Mama’s footsteps heading towards the door.

“Totally your fault,” Otabek says, and then rushes out of the room before he can get properly scolded.

Rada’s indignant shout follows him to his room.

*

Moving to Detroit is a somewhat anticlimactic affair. Otabek never wants to deal with furniture ever again, so he chooses a two bedroom apartment on the first floor of a grey brick building, with no stairs and that comes fully furnished. Rada is reluctantly impressed with the space when they arrive, probably because they are very near the heart of downtown as well. Otabek never really knew how important that is to him until he’s mapping his route from home to the skating rink and realizing he could walk there from downtown.

It takes them the better part of a morning to unpack their belongings; it’s becoming something of a routine at this point. It would be a little more depressing if the excitement of moving to a new city evaporated. As it is, Otabek drags his sister to the nearest cafe, where they order the traditional first meal of a new city: mac ‘n cheese and a BLT. They spend the rest of the day and all of the weekend going to different parks and museums until Rada ditches him to find a new hobby for the year. After that, Otabek spends a day getting used to Detroit’s public transportation system and looking for good boxing gyms around his apartment or the skating rink. He finds one in Bricktown, which means he can take the People Mover, and after that’s done he feels a little more confident contacting Celestino about his quarter-choreographed short program.

Celestino, for his part, sounds genuinely excited about Otabeke’s short program.

“Have you chosen any music for it?” he asks over the phone, “But nevermind. Show me what you have tomorrow, and we can talk all of the minutiae over then.”

Otabek has a really good feeling about the upcoming season. He can’t wait to get training again.

*

 **Me:**  
_I’m choreographing my own program this year_

**Yuri:**  
_It won’t help you beat me_

Which means he’s found out that Otabek is competing in Juniors for one more year. His phone buzzes again in his hands with another text before he can decide if he should be worried. 

**Yuri:**  
_can’t wait to see it._

**Me:**  
_You’ll love it_

**Me:**  
_or you’ll hate it, depending on what you tell The Media_

**Yuri:**  
_Oh I’ll definitely hate it_ Yuri replies, then adds three devil emojis to the end of the text.

*  
So, determined to come up with a program that Yuri will hate in public and love in private, Otabek throws himself into his training again.

Otabek is sixteen when he starts landing triple axels in practice pretty regularly. He hasn't been able to add the axel to his roster of jumps yet, as he only lands them about 50% of the time, but something about today has his hopes up. He's lost in thought, maybe getting ahead of himself thinking of all the places he can squeeze it into his short program, that he hardly even notices where he's going. 

“Wow, Otabek, great job!” A voice from the other end of the ice shouts.

Otabek startles and nearly trips over his own skates, pulled out of his thoughts by the voice. A boy skates up to him, and Otabek has to think for a moment before he remembers his name. Phichit has eyes that are warm like honey and an easy smile that reminds him of Leo. He’s a year older than Otabek, but has been competing at the Senior level for the past two years. He is also quite capable of befriending anyone on the planet, including taciturn and quiet people like himself (and the older boy standing just a few feet behind and to the left of Phichit, with heavy-looking glasses and jet black hair. He looks familiar, but Otabek can’t quite place him).

“Thank you,” Otabek says because he supposes one should say something after being complimented by a complete stranger.

“I recorded it, if you want to upload it somewhere,” Phichit says, and holds up his phone as evidence. “What’s your snapchat?”

“I don’t have one,” Otabek says.

“See,” the other boy mumbles behind Phichit, which is when Otabek notices a slight Japanese accent. “I’m not the only person on the planet that doesn’t have a snapchat.”

“I’m surrounded by troglodytes,” Phichit says dramatically, but he’s smiling while he says it, so Otabek assumes he’s not angry. “Otabek, you have to have a snapchat. What about instagram? Twitter? Pintrest? What about Line or Skype?”

“I don’t know what half of those are,” Otabek admits after a few seconds of staring Phichit down.

“See?” the boy behind Phichit says, but Phichit just waves the comment away with a frown on his face. “I can forgive you, Yuuri, because you are a special snowbean that needs to be protected, but you, Otabek? How are you friends with JJ AND Leo and still not have snapchat?”

“Snowbean?” the other boy says, right when Otabek responds with:

“I--your name is Yuri?”

He turns to the other boy, who blinks in surprise at being addressed. He runs a hand through his messy hair and smiles sheepishly. When he looks away like that, the light catches his glasses and makes them shine opaque for a moment. Otabek finds it vaguely intimidating, despite how the rest of the boy’s body language is at odds with that adjective.When he turns it puts his face into profile, and that’s when something in Otabek’s brain clicks and he realizes who he’s talking to.

“Katsuki Yuuri, yes,” he says, nodding. “Nice to meet you.”

“Otabek Altin,” Otabek says, and tries hard not to act like a complete and total fan.

It’s not every day that he gets to meet Japan’s Ace, after all. Otabek never would have guessed this unassuming boy is the one who’s taken Japan by storm. His presence is nothing like what it is on the ice; like polar opposites.

“Otabek!” Phichit whines. “Don’t be like Yuuri! I can’t get him to do anything except install instagram onto his old iphone. You won’t let me down, right?”

Then Phichit proceeds to hit Otabek with the most effective pair of puppy dog eyes he’s ever seen, and he has a 10-year-old sister. Behind him, Katsuki Yuuri is rolling his eyes and pocketing his phone, as if frightened Phichit might snatch it from him at any moment.

“Okay,” Otabek says, and despairs a little at how easily he’s swayed. This is why JJ and Leo are always getting him into trouble; he can’t be trusted to say no to someone with an easy smile. So he pulls out his phone and has just enough time to unlock the screen before Phichit is pulling it from his hands. “Hey!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll just install the most absolutely necessary ones,” Phichit says, and Otabek absolutely does not believe him, not for a minute.

And he has every right not to, because a full twenty minutes pass where absolutely no work gets done. Phichit takes roughly one thousand photos, both of Otabek alone and all three of them--he somehow even gets Celestino to pose for a singular selfie in exchange for an extra hour of cardio tomorrow before practise--before he’s satisfied and hands the phone back. Otabek stares in mild distress as the small bar in the upper right hand corner of his screen fills with notifications. Where does he even start?

“I followed a few people for you to start out with,” Phichit says, and then it seems that thirty-eight minutes of these shenanigans is the most Celestino will stand for, and makes them all get back to work.

Soon after they’re all properly scolded and separated to different parts of the rink, like misbehaving first graders. Otabek swipes open his phone and sees that by ‘A few people,’ Phichit actually means ‘the entire skating world as they know it’. He opens Instagram to see he follows Viktor Nikiforov’s official page, as well as Phichit, Katsuki Yuuri, JJ and Leo. Seconds later one of the little icons at the bottom of the screen goes red, and when Otabek taps it, he’s told that **kelebek_struck_gold** is following you and **official-altinfans** is following you. She’s already liked the three photos Phichit’s posted for him, and commented on the last one (which was Phichit’s shaky video of Otabek’s triple axel).

 

 **kelebek_struck_gold** someone’s finally brought my brother into the 21st century !!!! Great move Beka! ♥ @RaxmetRada @ayyyadin_altin

 

Which causes two more notifications ( _ **RaxmetRada** and **ayyyadin_altin** are now following you!_ )

Which all goes to mean that Celestino has to scold Otabek again when he gets caught in a loop of scrolling through his feed and following his sisters and brother. It’s--almost tragic, really. Phichit giggles on the other side of the room and makes a big show out of elbowing Katsuki Yuuri in the ribs at the sight.

*

Three days later at 11:45pm in Detriot, Michigan, Otabek gets several notifications all at once, that say essentially the same thing.

@yurip-official is following you on Twitter!  
**yuri-plisetsky** is following you on Instagram!  
**yuri-plisetsky** liked your photo

Otabek wonders how Yuri found his fledgling social media accounts, and certainly doesn’t spend the next hour scrolling through both Twitter and Instagram for the other boy’s photos.

(He allows himself exactly thirty three minutes, before his eyes are too tired and he falls asleep. After all, he’s got to be up at five the next day for kickboxing, so he needs the sleep.)

In the middle of the night, he gets a text from Yuri.

**Yuri:**  
_fucking finally_

*

The next day, he gets a snapchat notification. His first one. When he opens it, he’s so surprised he almost drops his phone onto the hard tiles of the locker rooms. It’s a photo of Yuri Plisetsky, lounging on a bank of bleachers and scowling into the camera like it’s personally insulted him. In the middle of the photo, it reads _haven't seen you land a triple axel in competition yet_.

Otabek puzzles over the image before it disappears, willfully ignoring the happy fluttering going on in his chest. He spends the next few minutes working out how to reply to the message and pointing his camera at random things in the room to see what would be the most neutral.

It’s a somewhat lopsided picture of the empty locker room. The fluorescent lights have made the normally dull olive walls look mint-bright and happy. Otabek wasn’t aware walls could look ‘happy’. The message reads: _Got to beat you somehow, right?_

He takes a deep breath before hitting send.

Then he shoves his phone into the depths of his duffel bag and rushes onto the ice, half-afraid of getting a reply, and half-afraid of the opposite.

*

He gets a reply, of course.

When he opens up his phone at lunch time, he’s got a snap that’s just a short video of Yuri doing a triple toe loop, single loop, triple salchow combination. It’s almost textbook perfect, and whoever is filming the clip howls with excitement when he lands it. Yuri turns to the camera, and from the distance, Otabek thinks he can make out the self-satisfied smirk on his face.

 _you wish_ is typed out by Yuri’s feet.

Something turns over itself in Otabek’s stomach, and he lets himself watch the video once more before hitting reply.

“When did you become one of those teenagers that’s always glued to their phones?” Celestino wonders loudly when he passes by Otabek with a bottle of water. “Phichit’s a bad influence, it seems.”

“I think he is,” Otabek mutters, but it’s quiet enough that Celstino doesn’t hear him.

So instead of sending Yuri another snap, he puts his phone away again and calmly eats his leftover Indian food.

*

“You’re home early,” Rada says that afternoon as soon as he closes the door behind him. “Did you skip your cardio workout today?”

 

“It’s weird that you have my schedule memorized like that,” Otabek says, which is answer enough on its own, he thinks. “And hello Rada. It’s good to see you too.”

“Stop pretending we’re polite people,” Rada says, and when her eyes travel over the slump in his shoulders, she frowns. “What’s wrong? You never come home without running at least three miles.”

Otabek sighs. He drops his stuff in a pile by the door, and doesn’t look up when he toes off his shoes. Already he can feel his ears turning red in preemptive embarrassment. “I have a problem.”

“Ohhhh,” Rada says, and stretches out the syllable for a good ten seconds. “I’m all ears, little brother. What’s wrong?”

Otabek looks at her, the way she’s sprawled across their brown suede couch, and decides to sit cross-legged on the floor beside her.

“I think I have a crush.”

“Oh? On who?” It’s definitely not in his imagination that Rada’s voice has gotten tight with excitement, even though she’s trying her hardest to keep the emotion from her face. Otabek is instantly suspicious. “Anyone I know? Is this a It’s Just Happened kind of crush or a I Just Realized It’s A Crush kind of crush?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Otabek says, and then rushes on before he has a chance to make it any worse. “His name is Yuri Plisetsky. He’s--”

“I know who that is,” Rada says, “You’ve not shut up about him since he hurt your feelings four years ago. And then that whole rivalry thing. Otabek, come on can you be any more transparent.”

“First of all, he did NOT--”

“I’ve gotta say, Beks, I’m glad you’re finally fessing up to it.”

“I’m--what?”

Otabek has to crane his neck pretty awkwardly to stare at his sister from where he’s sitting, but he manages it pretty well, he thinks. Above him, Rada is staring at him with a triumphant smirk plastered to her face.

“Bekatya, you’ve been low-key pining for that kid since you were twelve.”

“No I haven’t,” Otabek says, but he’s blushing even as he says it, the horrible truth making itself known to him for the first time. “I--I was just upset, at first, and then--”

“Obsessed,” Rada says meanly, and then laughs for a good thirty seconds while Otabek sputters indignantly.

So really, Otabek has no choice but to spring up from his spot on the floor and escape to the kitchen. Rada continues to be the worst possible sister in existence however, and follows after him.

“Rada, I need help,” Otabek says, opening and closing the cabinet under the sink with his foot.

“It’s not that hard, little brother,” Rada says. She hops up onto the counter, and with the size of their kitchen, she can extend her leg out and poke Otabek in the side lightly. “Just call him up. Text him. Talk to him.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Yeah, it is,” Rada says. “Look, I know that you’re sixteen so you think everything is terrible and also that no one knows how you feel, but trust me. It really is that simple. Just talk to the kid.”

“But he’s like fourteen,” Otabek says, just a touch hysterical.

“True,” Rada says. She kicks her legs a little. “But I mean, think about it. _You are already friends_. It’s not weird to text your friends. Also: I know you’re not a creep, and he probably knows you’re not a creep. I think you’ve spent too much time in America. You’re getting all kinds of weird hang-ups about age.”

“Maybe,” Otabek hedges. He opens the fridge lazily, thinking he may as well eat their Thai leftovers before Rada gets to them, when she slams the door shut in his face.

“I’m always right,” Rada says with a grin. “And you should probably go find that twenty four hour gym you like so much and exercise all of your anxiety away. I’m getting anxious just looking at you.”

“I’m fine,” Otabek grouses, but Rada waves the remark away.

“You’ll get mad at me tomorrow for letting you skip your cardio today.”

Which is actually true, as much as Otabek doesn’t want to admit it. Rada can sense her victory, so she saunters out of the kitchen, somehow exuding smugness by the way she sways her hips. Otabek rolls his eyes, grabs a water bottle out of the fridge, and heads for the door.

“Otabek,” Rada calls out as he’s about to close the door. She’s sitting at the couch again, but this time she’s sitting cross-legged with her hands in her lap. “Be careful, okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, even though he can tell she isn’t talking about his workout anymore. “I will be.”

*

Things seem much simpler after an hour spent on the treadmill, so Otabek opens up his snapchat and takes a quick selfie in the gym locker room before he leaves. It’s nothing scandalous, just Otabek in his sweats and black tank top. He notices then that his hair is getting long again and so he types out _thinking about cutting my hair. Thoughts?_ and sends it before he really has time to think about it.

It’s only when he’s back home, showered, and scrolling through his phone that he realizes Yuri would have gotten that snap at two in the morning, St. Petersburg time.

Otabek thinks that after a year of having a fake rivalry and being not-quite-friends because of it, he really should have gotten better at this. It’s never been this hard to talk to Leo or Jean. Which should have tipped him off at the beginning that he maybe might have had a crush on Yuri since the beginning, but then again, as the saying goes: hindsight is a bitch.

Yuri sends him a reply. He spends about thirty seconds looking at the little purple tick mark next to Yuri’s name in the app before he decides that he’s being ridiculous and taps on Yuri’s name.

The photo is a pair of scissors that have been crushed so that the blades are warped at almost ninety degree angles. _What I’ll do to anyone who touches your hair_ reads the caption, which.

Well.

Otabek is surprised at the way his cheeks flush at that. It’s just a bit embarrassing as well, considering it’s not much of a compliment if it had come from anyone else. But Yuri isn’t like anyone else; Otabek guesses that’s really the point.

Not knowing what to say to that, Otabek tucks his phone into his pocket. He tries very hard to ignore Rada’s knowing glances as he comes back home.

*

Otabek’s sixteenth birthday dawn's bitterly cold. The air coming in from Lake Eerie is downright frigid with the promise of snow. The city’s been spoiled by an unseasonably warm fall season, and now mother nature seems to be making up for it by bringing winter early. It’s expected to snow overnight. Rada bemoans this turn of events, so as she and the friends she’s made in the city were planning a Halloween bar crawl.

“And you’re saying I’m the one getting bent out of shape by all the weird American customs,” Otabek says. “I can’t believe you were going to bail on me on my birthday.”

“Halloween belongs to everyone,” Rada says stubbornly. “It is no one man’s day.”

“You didn’t even know what Halloween was four years ago,” Otabek protests, but Rada ignores him in favor of collapsing dramatically onto the couch and sighing grandly. “When did you get so unbearably extra,” Otabek tells her.

Rada opens her mouth to argue, but is cut off by an insistent knocking on the door. She grins in a way that makes Otabek instantly suspicious.

“Oh, that must be the Jessica's,” she says airily. “Get the door will you? I’m still in mourning.”

She throws her arm over her eyes for emphasis, and Otabek rolls his eyes at her antics, crossing the short distance to the door as he does so.

“I can’t believe you’re this--”

But the end of his sentence gets stuck in his throat, because when he pushes open the door, he’s bodily tackled to the ground by a vibrating ball of curly hair.

“BEKA,” the mass shouts, and behind her, two other people shout his name.

Otabek disentangle himself from his attacker enough that he can push a mass of hair from her face, and sees--

“Oh my God, Kelebek?”

“Mama got us plane tickets for your birthday!!” Aydin says from the door.

Otabek gets to his feet, and sees his sister and brother are wearing matching grins. Aydin has shot up almost a foot since he’s last seen him. While Otabek is busy gaping at his little brother, he takes that moment to swoop in for a hug as well, squeezing so tightly that Otabek is afraid for a moment of bruised ribs.

“What a surprise,” Rada says, although she doesn’t sound surprised at all. “Come here you goblins!” and then rushes to the door, pulls Aydin away and grabs Kelebek by the back of the neck to pull them both into a bone-crushing hug.

Otabek laughs in surprise, and it’s only when Rada has moved the whole group of them inside that he sees someone else lurking in the doorway.

“Jean?” Otabek says after a moment, and Jean, standing in the hallway of his two bedroom apartment in _Detroit, Michigan_ smiles sheepishly.

“Happy birthday, Otabek,” he says, and Otabek just stares at him for a few seconds.

He looks--well. Pretty much the same as he did when Otabek met him as an overexcited 12 year old, except much taller. Like Aydin, he’s shot up since the last time he’s seen him, and is sporting a severe-looking undercut that accentuates the line of his jaw more than the old, messy shock of black ever did. Otabek launches himself at Jean, and wraps his friend in a brief hug. Jean is startled into laughter, and he wraps his arms roughly around Otabek’s shoulders before pushing him off.

“I knew you missed me!” Jean crows triumphantly, and somewhere in the background, he hears a chorus of three simultaneous groans.

“Otabek, we haven’t been able to get JJ to _stop talking_ ,” Aydin says with a very fake scowl, if you ask Otabek.

Jean just grins some more, and then does the JJ-style(™) hands that gets three different pieces of crumpled up paper thrown at him.

“They’re just jealous they don’t have a move as iconic as JJ-Style,” Jean says loudly and in that moment, Otabek loves all of them so fiercely he thinks he might burst from it.

“What are you doing here?” he says instead.

“Coldplay is in Detroit for a secret Halloween concert,” Jean says easily, letting himself into Otabek’s apartment like he owns the place. “And so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.”

“Your friend is such a liar, Beka,” Kelebek says on the other side of the living room. “We met up at the airport, and he hasn’t been able to stop talking about how excited he was to see you the whole damn time.”

“Slander!” Jean exclaims, and then Kelebek throws a sock at him.

“It’s true,” Aydin says seriously. Then, as if he’d forgotten, adds, “Otabek, I haven’t even given you a birthday hug yet. That first one was a welcome hug.”

Which is all the warning he gets before Aydin launches himself into his arms much in the way Kelebek did. Aydin, however, gets much more airtime, which results in Otabek grabbing onto his little brother for dear life while Jean tries to steady them. From the depths of the apartment, Rada appears purely to hip check them out of their precarious balance.

“Oops,” she says, casually, and sends the three of them down into a pile on the floor again.

“Birthday dog pile!” Kelebek says, and then she and Rada pile into the fray. Otabek can’t catch his breath from the laughter.

*  
It’s lucky that neither Jean nor Otabek are going to the final JPF qualifying (Jean having qualified in France and Otabek at Skate America), which means they both have the long month of November before the Grand Prix. Jean has managed to negotiate an entire week off before he’s called back to Canada. Kelebek and Aydin, it turns out, have only managed to weasel a weekend trip out of their parents.

“They don’t want us missing too much school,” Aydin says sadly, and Kelebek nods behind him.

So they decide to pack those three days with as much sightseeing as possible. They go to the Arts institute, and then spend almost a full day wandering downtown. And then, at Aydin’s insistence they go to Belle Isle and nearly freeze to death staring out into the water of Lake St. Clair. The wind chill that day makes it seem like 37 degrees (2 degrees Celsius? He’s spent too much time in America), and so it becomes a family event to convince Aydin that no matter how appealing it looks, to take a swim through the Detroit River is almost certainly instant death by hypothermia.

Aydin stares out into the water for a long time before answering. 

“I want to be an ice swimmer someday,” he says sadly.

And no one believes him except for Jean, who wraps an arm around his shoulder amiably and says, “You can do whatever you set your mind to!” Although he does steer Aydin away from the edge of the water, and when he catches Otabek’s eye, he winks and points to the ferry. “Let’s get some hot chocolate!”

Which is quickly seconded by Kelebek, and the whole group of them pile back into the ferry, where there is no heat, but at least the wood and glass keeps out the wind. 

*

He gets a text halfway through the day that stops him in his tracks. It’s silly, especially considering the fact that he’s in the middle of downtown detroit with his family and his closest friend. But Otabek’s pocket buzzes, and when he sees the name, it makes him wish for a few impossible seconds that he was maybe somewhere else in the world. That he was maybe in Russia, so that he could see a flash of green eyes and maybe a smile from a boy that has never consistently given them to Otabek.

 _I didn’t know it was your birthday_ Yuri’s texted him. _Happy Birthday_

 _Thank you_ Otabek writes back, and thinks about the strange thing that’s happening in his chest, tries to find a way to put it into words.

“Who’s got you looking so happy?” Jean asks, bumping shoulders with him as they walk across a busy street. “You almost walked straight into oncoming traffic.”

“No one,” Otabek says, even though he knows that lying to Jean is always an exercise in futility. He always weasels the truth out of Otabek eventually. Like clockwork, Jean’s wolfish grin spreads across his mouth. 

“OOOOHhhh,” he says and then tries unsuccessfully to take Otabek’s phone from him. “A new paramour, perhaps?”

 

“Never say the word paramour again, oh my god,” Otabek says before he can stop himself. He snatches his phone away from Jean’s clutches. Jean pouts extravagantly, and for so long that it starts to attract the attention of Kelebek, who can sniff out this sort of gossip like a bloodhound. “Fine,” Otabek says, and hands over his phone obediently.

Jean, being the worst friend of all time, spends a very long time looking through his chat log, with a very strange expression on his face.

“I feel like we only ever have the same conversations,” Jean says, somewhat bemused. “But aren’t you supposed to be enemies? I mean, you stayed in juniors so you could beat him, right?”

Otabek says nothing, but he thinks his halfhearted shrug is all the answer that Jean needs. And Jean, continuing the trend of being the absolute worst, brings a hand up to his heart and affects a wounded expression. He throws himself dramatically against the wall of a nearby building, and it’s only the fact that they’re all waiting on the crosswalk light to change that they don’t leave him behind.

“I’m hurt,” Jean says. “We were supposed to debut together, as brothers! And you left me to struggle through seniors without you so that you could do the same thing with--” here, he has the grace to side-eye Otabek’s siblings. He waits to make sure they’re all engrossed in their own argument before continuing, at a lower volume. “I didn’t know you two were like that.”

“Like what?” Otabek mumbles. “We’re friends, sort of. Honestly, I don’t know what we are.”

“You’re willing to stay in juniors for another season after this so that you two can debut together.”

“I’m not doing that,” Otabek snaps, and realizes in that moment that it’s true. It had been a somewhat impulsive decision on his part, if he thinks about it. Now, the thought of staying in juniors for another season after this one is tedious to the point of untenable. The only competition at his age there is Yuri, who is fourteen and too good for his own good. He also knows for a fact that Yuri Plisetsky will not stay in juniors for one year more than he needs to. There’s not a doubt in his mind that Yuri will debut next season as well. 

None of this is new information, but it hits him hard all the same. 

Jean doesn’t reply to that, but he’s uncharacteristically quiet on the walk to Otabek’s apartment, and carries a shrewd look on his face well into the evening. 

Much later, when they’ve all returned to the apartment and Jean drags Otabek out into downtown for an actual underground Coldplay concert, he finally pipes up again.

“We’re still besties, right?” he asks, and even though his tone is light and teasing, Otabek still hears an undercurrent of fear in the question.

“Of course, Jean,” Otabek says, and then wraps an arm around his shoulder. “Let’s go listen to some terrible music.”

“Coldplay is not terrible,” Jean insists, and then he pulls out his phone and takes a series of selfies. “For Instagram,” he says, and then spends the whole taxi drive to the concert hall trying to convince Otabek to like them. 

He manages to get Otabek to post a mirror of one of them, when they’re standing outside the building. Jean’s got an arm around Otabek this time, and Otabek has pushed his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket; is resolutely looking away from Jean and has the touch of a scowl on his face. 

**yuri-plisetsky** liked your photo

All in all, it’s not the worst birthday Otabek has had.

*

They stumble back home at close to two in the morning, trying and mostly failing at being silent. Kelebek is curled up on the inflatable mattress in the living room, and Aydin is nothing more than a jumble of blankets on the couch. Neither of them so much as move when the door snaps shut behind them. Otabek and Jean stumble into Otabek’s bedroom, whereupon Jean immediately collapses onto Otabek’s bed. 

“You are not sleeping there,” Otabek says, tugging at his friend’s foot.

“Beka,” Jean whines in a facsimile of Kelebek. Otabek stops short at that, thinking that it must be the first time Jean’s called him by that particular nickname. “I’m a delicate flower. I need something soft.”

“You’re the one who insisted the sleeping bag would be fine,” Otabek says, pointing to the space on the floor that’s been cleared. 

Jean’s sleeping bag is laid out meticulously, parallel to Otabek’s bed. It’s bright purple, and is obviously custom made, because it has, in large looping letters, the phrase _JJ STYLE!_ emblazoned across the front. It is an affront to God and man, and Jean is lucky Otabek’s let the thing in his room. He’s not going to let the man weasel Otabek out of his own bed. 

(Which is a lie. Otabek eventually gives up on the impossible task of hauling Jean out of bed and curls up in Jean’s terrible, awful, tacky sleeping bag.)

@Altinfans_official posts a photo of him curled up in Jean’s hideous sleeping bag to Twitter and Instagram, with a caption that reads: Looks like an endorsement to me! @jj-leroy #jjstyle

Otabek doesn’t talk to either Jean or Kelebek for the next four hours out of spite. 

*

Aydin and Kelebek leave for Kazakhstan two days later.They fill up Otabek’s phone with roughly one million selfies, and even deign to take a single photo with Jean. 

“I guess he’s not too bad,” Kelebek says on their last night in the United States. “I mean, I guess.”

“He grows on you,” Rada says darkly. 

Jean, who has been lounging on the couch beside the two of them with a smile on his face, laughs at that. 

“I’m wounded, Rada,” he exclaims. “You told me I was your favorite when we first met! I was planning on asking you to marry me.”

“Please tell me you’re joking,” she says, and when Jean continues to smile at her, she grumbles and whacks him playfully upside the head. 

“Rada, My one true love!” Jean says which causes Aydin and Kelebek to burst into laughter at the expression this pulls onto Rada’s face. 

Otabek knows Jean’s tells enough to know he’s messing with her, and so he sighs expansively and shakes his head. 

“It’s true, Rada,” he says, which makes all of his siblings turn to him sharply. “I helped him pick out the ring.”

“You are such a liar!” she says, but there’s a blush starting up on the line of her neck. 

A moment passes where Jean and Otabek share a regretful look, and then Otabek breaks and smiles. Rada pushes him so hard he falls off the couch. 

“I hate you both,” she says over the sound of four rowdy teens laughing. 

The next morning the lot of them minus Jean squeeze into Rada’s car and head for the airport. There are many promises to visit as soon as possible, both from Kelebek and Aydin, as well as Rada. There’s a moment when they’re all sure Kelebek will burst into tears, and then Aydin beats her to it when he rushes forward to wrap his arms around Rada’s waist. 

“Come home soon,” he mumbles into the folds of Rada’s jacket. “It’s lonely in our house.”

“There are five of you living there,” Rada says, but she pulls Aydin closer all the same. “But we will. I promise.”

He pulls away and rubs at his eyes impatiently with the too-long sleeve of his hoodie. 

They all hug one last time, and Otabek has to swallow past the lump in his throat when he pulls away from his siblings. 

“We’ll visit soon,” he says. 

Kelebek turns a pair of inscrutable eyes on him. It leaves him feeling strangely exposed. 

“You better,” she says quietly, and then adds, “Come on Ayanya,” and leads their little brother away to security by her firm grip on his sleeve. 

*

The drive back to the apartment is near silent; Otabek is lost in thought the entire time, and honestly hardly remembers most of the forty minutes they spend in a taxi. Rada slams the door to her room shut the instant they get home, which leaves Otabek standing in the front hallway, feeling somewhat lost. 

“I take it the send off wasn’t as happy as the reunion,” Jean says lightly from his spot on the couch. 

Otabek shakes his head and crosses to the living room. He’d almost forgotten Jean was staying for much longer. Otabek finds that all the words end up drying out in his mouth, and a strange, hollow feeling curls up in the pit of his stomach, something like homesickness, but sour too, tinged with bitterness. Otabek stares at his best friend for a long time, and feels as if he’s looking at him for the first time. 

“You cut your hair,” he finally decides to say. 

Jean smiles and looks away. On anyone else, it would be bashful, but Jean somehow manages to make the move seem confident. 

“Yes,” he says. “Ah. I wanted a different look.”

“You stole my haircut.”

“You do not have this haircut,” Jean helpfully points out, and then points at Otabek’s tragically wild mop of hair. “I don’t think you’ve cut it since you left Canada three years ago. Therefore, I can’t have possibly stolen it.”

“Right,” Otabek says with a smile. 

Nevermind that Otabek was the one who’d sent him all the Google search results to ‘Undercut boys’ when he hadn’t known what Otabek was talking about. Jean runs a hand over the back of his head, which has only been recently sheared. 

“Jean,” he says again, once the curl of amusement has died back down into the sour thing clinging to his insides. “Jean, what am I doing out here?”

“Training, obviously,” Jean says. After a beat he narrows his eyes. “Is this a trick question?”

“No, I just.” Otabek takes a sharp breath, wrestling with the words to describe his strange mood. “I’ve been away from home for a long time.”

Jean stares him down with a frown, his normally carefree expression turned serious. 

“There wasn’t a way to get better at home,” Jean says carefully. “You’re the one who told me that.”

“I know.“

“Is there anyone in Almaty, or anywhere in Kazakhstan, who would be a better fit as a coach now?”

“No,” Otabek says, and runs a hand through his hair. “I still feel guilty, I guess.” 

“I don’t understand, but I empathize,” Jean says with a familiar quirk to his mouth. “I’ve grown up with skating. I’ve been groomed to be the King since I was born, pretty much.”

“Just because you call yourself King JJ does not mean you are actually royalty, Jean, oh my God,” Otabek can’t help but say with a touch of despair. 

Jean shrugs because he is sometimes a terrible excuse for a human being. 

“What I mean is, I didn’t really have much of a choice,” he says. “I was born with greatness, and also happened to have greatness thrust upon me--”

“Jean, I swear I’m being serious--”

“I know just give me a second!” he says. “What I _mean_ is you chose to do this. There are probably a million things you are good at and could do for a living. But you’re here, in Detroit, training for a silver or better in three weeks to get gold at the Junior GPF. Next year, you’ll be doing the same thing with the seniors. I didn’t really have much of a choice, when you get right down to it.”

“I can’t believe you actually bastardized Shakespeare to make your terrible point,” Otabek finally says after a moment of silence. 

“See! You know Shakespeare well enough to spot a quote in everyday life! I just Googled inspirational quotes last week and that was my favorite!” Jean waves his arms wildly for emphasis here. “Otabek, you could be great doing anything you wanted to. But you’re here, and you can’t regret that. Not if you still want to keep being here.” 

Otabek fiddles with the hem of his sleeve and doesn’t answer for a moment. Inside all of that bullshit, Jean has a good point. When all is said and done, Otabek is a skater first, and a brother second. It’s not something he’s particularly proud of, but the fact stares down at him from his ceiling on many nights, when he’s tired and frustrated and missing home. And it stares up at him now from the carpet, with Jean’s words ringing between them. He chose to be a skater, and he chose to leave his family, and there is very little in the world that would make him go back before he’s ready. 

“I’m going to bed,” he tells Jean. 

They both turn to the kitchen clock, which reads an accusatory 9:45pm. Jean smiles gamely and stretches all along the couch, pillowing his head in his hands. After all, he’s never needed to have anything spelled out for him. Otabek is sure Jean’s heard his plea for solitude in the quiet statement. 

“I’ll be up for a bit,” he says easily without a hint of judgment, proving that he’s actually a great friend, despite all the terrible things he’s just made Otabek listen to. “Yell if you need me.”

Otabek is so grateful for that right now, for the ability to just put a conversation on hold with absolutely no judgment. But he doesn’t think he can even articulate what it is that is making his insides feel so cold, and knows he’ll just be terrible company tonight. So Otabek stumbles into his room and tries to get some sleep. They’ve finally gotten around to buying a set of blackout curtains, so once he closes his door and turns out his lights, it really is easy to get lost in the dark. 

Of course, sleep eludes him. 

The darkness has a way of stripping deceptions from him, and so it’s easy to admit to himself that he doesn’t regret the long years he’s spent away from home, and if it would make him a better skater, he would gladly spend the rest of his life hopping from continent to continent, homeless but for the ice that’s claimed him. 

The hours pass in a slow crawl. He thinks he must have slept at least fitfully, because at one point he checks his phone and sees it’s almost four in the morning. It’s that time of night where nothing really seems real, too early to get up and start the day, but still too dark to be considered anything but night. Otabek stares and stares at his ceiling, misses the sluggish glow of the stars he’d placed on his bedroom in Almaty. 

Before he really knows what he’s doing, his phone is in his hands again and his contacts are open. He looks at his screen for a very long time, at the names that glow up at him. Tries to figure out the time difference again, but doesn’t end up looking it up before hitting the call button. 

It rings twice before the call goes through; Otabek is half expecting to go to voicemail, so when Yuri’s voice calls his name out incredulously through the speaker, for a moment he’s quiet.

“Hi,” Otabek eventually says, and the silence on the other end of the phone speaks volumes.

“What time is it wherever you are?” he finally asks, but lower, as if unwilling to be overheard. Otabek wonders where he is; if it’s early enough that he’s still at home or if he’s already at practise.

“Early,” Otabek says. Then, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to call. You must be busy.”

“It’s my lunch break,” Yuri says, dismissive. There’s a scuffling sound over the line, and then footsteps. “What’s up? Is something wrong?”

“No,” Otabek admits, and then pulls his blankets higher around his shoulders in an attempt to keep out all the unwanted feelings. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Right,” Yuri scoffs. “So you normally call your friends at three in the morning for no reason.” 

Otabek is silent, which is enough of an admission in itself. Yuri scoffs again, and then falls silent. Otabek counts to eight in his head before he speaks again.

“Are we friends?” 

“Fucking duh,” Yuri says, as if the answer is obvious. “Who the fuck actually talks to people over the phone? No one does that with people they don’t like anymore. That’s what the ignore button is for, Otabek.” 

“Right,” Otabek says, and the confident way that Yuri’s proclaimed that makes a little of the tight anxiety drip away from him. 

“I mean, that photo of you in that awful JJ sleeping bag was a close call,” Yuri continues mercilessly. “I almost decided we were enemies for real.”

“There was nothing I could do,” Otabek replies with a smile. “Jean had usurped my bed.”

“Ugh, I can’t believe you call him Jean,” Yuri says. “Like he’s an actual person.”

“Jean’s not so bad once you get to know him,” he can’t help but defend. “He’s a good guy, deep down.”

“Very deep down, maybe,” Yuri says, and Otabek can’t really disagree with him. “But I still don’t really believe it.”

Otabek falls silent, and across the planet, Yuri does the same. 

“I miss my family,” he finally whispers into the dark. “More than normal. Kelebek--my sister--she made us promise we’d come back home, but I don’t know when that will happen. Do you… I mean. Your grandfather lives in Moscow, right?”

“Da,” Yuri says, and Otabek wonders where he is right now. Any background nose that he could hear at the beginning of the call has faded away now. “I’ve been alone for most of my life. I guess I just deal with it.” 

“How?”

“I don’t fucking know, honestly,” Yuri breathes over the line. Otabek hears the way he takes a short breath in. “Probably by hating 90% of the people I meet, and refusing to speak to them. Breaking shit also helps.”

“Right, I remember,” Otabek says, and thinks back to the night years ago, when Yuri had taken him out to break stuff and had instead gotten Otabek to teach him the basics of boxing instead. “Do you still do any boxing?”

“There’s no time,” Yuri says, and at least he sounds like he regrets it. “I would if there were just more hours in the day.”

Something in his tone of voice makes Otabek believe him. 

“Maybe someday we could do it together again,” Otabek says before he can stop himself.

“I’d like that,” Yuri says after an excruciatingly long silence. Otabek lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I have to get back to practise.”

“Oh, right,” he says, and presses the heel of his hand against his forehead. He’d forgotten for a moment that Yuri was in the middle of a public space, in the middle of the day, and Otabek has intruded on his afternoon with maudlin midnight worries. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, asshole,” Yuri bites out. “Call me whenever you need to, okay? I’ll pick up. I swear.”

“Okay.”

 

*

Jean spends the first lazy days of November with him, lounging about the house as Otabek avoids practise for the first time in his life, and then Otabek’s conscience gets the best of him, and he goes back to his kickboxing classes. For some reason, he feels guiltier missing those than skating practise. Either way, it’s the end of his hour-long session, almost six months into training when his coach brings up the idea of competing in a tournament. He’s unwinding his hand wraps when Skye approaches him again.

“Otabek,” they say, “I’ve got a question for you. There’s a spot open for the Silver Gloves Tournament this year. If you want, I could help you sign up.”

Otabek looks up with a frown. Skye’s hair is normally pulled back onto a small ponytail for class, but they must’ve let it loose afterwards. It hangs just under their jawline in light, messy-looking curls. He stares at the messy strands, wondering just what silver gloves have to do with anything. Then, he remembers.

“Oh,” he says because it’s the only word in his brains for a moment. “That’s that boxing thing right?”

Skye nods enthusiastically while Otabek stares down at his gloves. He’s never really thought of himself as very good at boxing in particular, and from what he’s heard of some of the other trainers around the gym, the Silver Gloves is one of the top boxing competitions in the country. Otabek competes on a global scale and has proven himself one of the top junior figure skaters in the world, but still the thought of a statewide boxing tournament makes him nervous.

“You’ve been training for four years with different coaches all around the country,” Skye presses when Otabek doesn’t answer. “I honestly think you could do pretty well. Think about it, yeah?”

He makes a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat in answer, which Skye takes to be a rousing endorsement and hands him a stack of forms that he promises to look over before he can get away.

He decides on the way home that he’s not going to do it, and then Rada goes crazy when he tells him and practically bullies him into doing it. 

“I just think it would be the coolest thing ever,” she says, and Otabek’s genuinely surprised by her excitement. “You’ve been doing this for like, ever, and never have thought of competing even for fun. I’d thought your competitive side would have won out by now.”

“I don’t have a competitive side,” Otabek lies, but Rada chooses to ignore that statement. 

“I think you could win, little brother,” Rada says. “And how cool would that be? I mean, it’s no GPF trophy, but how many ice skaters could say they’ve won a boxing competition?”

So he tells Skye that he’s interested and fills out the stack of forms and waivers. The next time he sees them, she hands him a folder with a new training schedule, as suddenly they need to start focusing less on kicking a bag and more on mock fights.

The month of November passes by in a blur of boxing, with the occasional practise on the ice to keep his programs in his mind. Celestino despairs, but he’s also weirdly supportive of Otabek’s decision to join this boxing tournament. Apparently, Celestino was a huge fan of boxing back when he was young, and promises to be at the tournament to cheer him on. Otabek doesn’t know what to do with the warm feelings that puts in the pit of his stomach, so he doesn’t say anything. 

Phichit, likewise, is practically bouncing from excitement by the time the tournament rolls around. 

“Your sister’s going with you right?” he asks at the end of his last practise before the tournament. “She’ll live-tweet it, right?”

“You follow my sister?” is the only answer Otabek can give to that.

“Of course,” Phichit says easily, “It’s the only way to get any real information about you. You never use your twitter anyway. And after all of the trouble I went through to get it set up too.”

“Sorry Phichit,” Otabek says, but Phichit is already waving away his apology. “Rada will be there. Of course she will be.”

Otabek doesn’t think she’ll actually live-tweet the thing, especially if it turns out that Otabek is terrible and gets knocked out within the first round, but Phichit doesn’t seem to agree. He offers Otabek a million good-lucks and you’ll-do-greats!

Likewise, both Jean and Leo send him good-luck texts that afternoon. Both of them are equally confident that he’ll do great. Otabek is not so sure.

He writes out a text to Yuri, and then erases it several times. If there’s one person who’s opinion Otabek trusts, it’s Yuri’s. Which is a strange thing to think, really, because he hasn’t seen him in person all year. None of their qualifying events this year have lined up, and so it won’t be until the GPF in December that they’ll get to see each other again. Still, there’s something that tells him that if Yuri were to tell him he’d do great, he’d actually believe it.

In the end, he doesn’t text him, and feels like a coward for the rest of the night.

*

The day of the tournament dawns much the same way every other day does, with the added stress that he only ever feels before competition. It’s not until this moment that he realizes how invested he is in this. He wonders for a moment what his life would be like if he did this professionally instead of ice skating; if he’d be any different without the ice skating. The answer, of course is that he’d never have met Jean or Leo. He never would have met a certain pair of bright green eyes that dared him to do better. 

“Are you ready, Beka?” Rada calls from the kitchen, and so Otabek takes a handful of deep breaths and grabs his duffel bag. 

It feels suspiciously light without his skates in it. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s forgetting something the entire drive to the boxing ring. Skye is waiting for them at the front, and they help Otabek sign in and get everything ready. 

“Your first opponent is Ron Parker from Traverse City,” Skye says when they get inside to the waiting area behind the stands. “He’s a year older, two inches shorter, and has a mean right hook. Low stamina, though. You can outlast him.” 

In the end, the first match feels like a strange mix between practise and competition. All the same nerves are there, and when he steps into the ring the cheering is the same. But he puts his gloves up, and it feels just like every other sparring match he’s been in since he was old enough to hop into a boxing ring on his own. He’s been doing this for almost five years now, and it’s easy to fall into the rhythm of a sparring session. 

The only difference is that when Ron Parker lands a right hook to Otabek’s side, he’s aiming to punch the air out of him. Otabek retreats for long enough to catch his breath, out of reach of his opponent for just a hairsbreadth. It lures Parker to him, thinking perhaps that he’s coming in for the kill, but Otabek is faster, lands a series of uppercuts that leave his opponent huddling and retreating. 

Otabek has never thought of himself as a violent person. However, there’s a certain amount of aggression he taps into every other day of his life, to succeed in kickboxing. And that aggression turns into something primally dangerous after the first five rounds sparring with Parker. It’s like something switches in his head, and he suddenly starts hitting at his full power. He’s suddenly out for blood.

Parker lasts one more round after that, and then Otabek gets him hard in the side. He falls to the floor, and doesn’t get up.

The bell rings and Parker groans from his spot on the floor. The boy’s coach floods to the ring and helps the kid up, while the referee holds up Otabek’s arm and blows his whistle. 

The tournament winds on. Otabek fights twice that day, and his second win almost feels like a cheat. The boy’s name is Frederick McGuire, and it’s clear that he’s not quite recovered from his first fight. He’s slow, and sluggish, and Otabek drops him halfway through the third round. In the audience, Skye pumps their fists triumphantly, a wild look in their eyes. Rada beside them has her phone out, and Otabek flashes her a grin that’s all endorphins and teeth when the ref raises his arm in triumph again. 

*  
The tournament lasts three days. Otabek fights once at the end of the second day, and takes a hard jab to his face that leaves him seeing stars for a moment. It’s the longest fight he’s had to date, but at the end of it, he’s still standing when the last bell rings, and it means that he’s moved up to the final round at the end of tomorrow.

Celestino finds him at the end of the day and wraps him in a hug, despite the fact that Otabek probably reeks of sweat. 

“Don’t forget to ice that bruise,” Celestino says with a wink. “You won’t want a black eye for the GPF.”

“Right,” Otabek says, and can’t help touch the puffy skin around his right eye in experimentation.

*

Otabek’s never thought of himself as a dangerous person, but then again, look where he is. He has just spent three days fighting the top boxers in the state of Michigan, and at the end of the tournament, he’s standing over a boy three years older than him. Otabek hits him hard with an uppercut that clips him straight in the jaw, and there’s something dark in his belly that curls in satisfaction when he pulls out his mouth guard and spits out a mouthful of blood.

“Fuck,” the kid says during the quick break. “He’s tougher than he looks.”

His coach says something that Otabek doesn’t catch, and then he spits a mouthful of blood one last time and the bell rings. The world condenses to the movement of one other person, to the heaviness of his gloves and the positions of his feet. He stops thinking of anything that isn’t an opening in the other boy’s form, until finally, deep into the eighth round, Otabek hits him again in the stomach, so hard it drops the other boy.

The referee counts, and Otabek feels like he’s swimming through molasses. He watches the other kid pant and try to stand back up. 

One, Two, Three--

But Otabek’s watching the trembling in the other boy’s legs, and knows he won’t stand back up in time. 

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

The bell rings.

This time, it’s a different kind of victory, and the dark, violent thing in Otabek’s stomach says he might just enjoy this more than a GPF win. Otabek gets a pair of silver-gilded boxing gloves, and when he holds them up over his head, he remembers with sudden clarity Yuri Plisetsky doing the same with his GPF gold. He lets the thought confuse him for a few seconds, but then his sister gets past the security guards and throws her arms around him, and he lets the violent, darkness enjoy the win instead. 

*

The response to Otabek’s win at a statewide boxing tournament is at the level of nuclear apocalypse. Every single member of Otabek’s family demands a separate phone call; his mother cries, half fear and half anger that he’d actually agreed to something so violent. Leo and Jean both skype him and go half-crazy when they see his black eye. The next day, Phichit assures Otabek that it’s all over the internet (Otabek can’t really bring himself to look at any of it). Celestino rewards him with a hearty pat on the back, and then makes him run his programs back to back until he’s shaking head to foot--a remarkably easy feat considering every single part of his body is still impossibly bruised and sore. 

“That black eye won’t be gone for the Junior GPF,” Celestino remarks that day when Otabek is collapsed on a bench, wondering if it wouldn’t be easier to just sleep here for the night. 

The GPF is three days away, and so of course Celestino is right. Otabek flies to Fukuoka with the skin around his eye still a dull purple, the right side of his ribs still somewhat tender from one too many hits to the ribs that he couldn’t quite block, and the skin of his knuckles still scabbed over. He’s lucky they booked a red eye and that when they check into the hotel sometime around midnight, hardly anyone is waiting around in the lobby anymore. 

In fact, there’s only one other person slouching along one of the weirdly geometrical loveseats in the lobby. Their long legs are hanging off of one of the armrests, and the hood of their jacket is pulled down low, so only only a fringe of blonde hair is visible when Otabek passes them by. But he just happens to look up from his phone while Otabek is staring at the line of his legs (and idly imagining what his Mama would say if Otabek tried to sit that way). Otabek’s eyes catch on a pair of intense green eyes, and he stutters to a stop, staring.

“Yuri?” Otabek says, and rubs his eyes, wondering if he’s slipped into some kind of waking dream.

“Fucking finally,” Yuri Plisetsky says, and then jumps to his feet, pocketing his phone as he goes. His eyes rake over Otabek’s face, and he feels a blush begin to form along his ears. “What the fuck happened to your face?”

“I had a boxing tournament,” Otabek says, and thanks a whole slew of gods he doesn’t believe in that neither Rada nor Celestino are with him at the moment. “It was no big deal.”

“Oh right,” Yuri says, shoving his hands into his pockets. When he shrugs, it’s with an air of affected calm. “I remember seeing about it on your sister’s instagram.”

“You follow Rada?”

Yuri shrugs again and then looks away. He thinks he can spy the a faint pink coming up to Yuri’s cheeks. 

“How else am I supposed to keep track of anything you do?” he says aggressively. “You only fucking got any social media like, two and a half days ago and you don’t post _anything_.”

Otabek runs a hand through the back of his hair. He thinks that he should probably get it cut, and then he thinks that he likes it when Yuri blushes, and then he remembers to be embarrassed, because his face is currently a mangled mess and Yuri is staring at him with an indecipherable expression on his face.

“I can post more,” Otabek says tentatively; it feels somewhat like a trap, even though he’s not entirely sure why.

“Good,” Yuri says, as if that settles that. Then he turns on his heel and slinks off in the direction of the door. “Come on. We’re going out.”

 

Otabek has enough time to wonder just where they can go; there aren’t a lot of places anywhere in the world that would allow kids aged fourteen and sixteen in at this hour. But Yuri’s already stalked out the sliding doors of the hotel, and Otabek rushes after him.

It turns out, ‘going out’ means walking down the street in the chilly Japanese winter until they find a deserted park. There’s a sign posted along the gate, which Otabek assumes has very easy to follow rules, and which probably would say that the park is officially closed at this time, if either of them could read it. As it is, Yuri glances around the street as if to check that the coast is clear before hopping over the short fence without pulling his hands out of his pockets. Otabek rolls his eyes, just a little, and uses the gate like a normal person. 

“What are we doing here?” Otabek can’t help but ask after he’s watched Yuri circle the small jungle gym like an oversized cat. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Yuri admits, and then decides to hop onto a swing, his feet planted firmly on the seat as he drifts slightly, forward and back. 

It’s lucky that they have a full two days before the competition starts, Otabek thinks. He wonders if a lack of sleep affects Yuri as negatively as it does to Otabek. Otabek watches Yuri for a moment, before he takes a seat on the swing to Yuri’s right. The whole metal structure creaks as Otabek sits, and he imagines for a second the whole thing collapsing under their weight. But the swingset holds, and Otabek looks up at the cloudy sky and wonders if it’ll snow.

“I always sleep on planes,” Otabek says into the darkness between them. “I get motion sick, so I take like, dramamine and a sleep aid to pass out.”

“So you’re not sleepy either?” Yuri asks, still staring out into the middle distance.

“Yeah.”

They stay like that for another silent moment; both of them seemingly lost in thought. Otabek remembers, suddenly, one of their very first conversations and can’t help but break the silence.

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

“And you hit me over the head with your fucking bag?” Yuri says, scoffing. “Yeah.”

“No,” Otabek answers with a frown. “After that. We were in the locker room. I caught you--”

“Right,” Yuri bites out, not letting him finish the sentence. Like he doesn’t want the empty Japanese air to know he’d been crying a million years ago. “What about it?”

“Why were you, you know,” Otabek says. He shrugs. “What made you so upset?”

Yuri takes a deep breath and lets it out in something like an imploding sigh. He slides down until he’s sitting in his swing set, pushes himself forward and back with the tip of his shoe. 

“I’d gotten a letter in the mail,” Yuri starts with a flat voice. “It was from my mom. It was a fucking postcard from Italy. She’d said. Well. She’d said she’d met a man who was going to make her a model and that she was moving away. That she hoped I could visit one day, when I was old enough.”

There’s only a single lamp along this side of the park, and it’s left them in a perpetual twilight-like darkness. Yuri swallows, and Otabek watches his silhouette in the semi-dark as he brings an arm up to rub over his face. 

“What the fuck does that even mean, you know?” Yuri finally says, his voice rough like he maybe wants to yell. “I wasn’t even fucking ten at the time. I mean. It’s not like I’d seen her much the month before that, but Dedushka always said she was coming home soon, and. Yeah.”

“She didn’t come back?” Otabek replies quietly.

Yuri’s head shakes his head sharply, once.

“I heard from her like, once more that year,” Yuri says. “And then not a fucking thing.” Yuri’s hackles seem to rise; if he’d been an animal, Otabek thinks he would have been able to see the fur at the back of his neck start to prickle up. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t fucking need her.”

“Yeah,” Otabek answers, although he suspects Yuri doesn’t need to hear it.

“I don’t need either of them.”

They lapse into silence again, Yuri kicking harshly against the sand under their feet. 

Otabek wants to ask very badly about that, although he suspects he already knows. In the scant interviews that Yuri has done, the only familial support he’s ever mentioned is his grandfather. He praises Nikolai Plisetsky as if he’s responsible for the rising of the sun, but besides that there’s nothing of his home life. He watches the slant of Yuri’s shoulders until the silence gets unbearable again.

“Did your Dad leave too?”

Yuri shrugs.

“I don’t know. I never knew him. Mama used to make up all of these stories about him, but that was a long time ago. My Dedushka never talks about him.”

Otabek nods, and they descend into silence again. Otabek thinks it’s probably not the best thing that the first time they see each other in a year and he’s completely tanked Yuri’s mood.

“Hey,” he says suddenly, struck by an idea. “Do you remember the last time we went to a park?”

Yuri stills his slight movement, squints his eyes suspiciously.

“Maybe,” Yuri hedges, although Otabek can see that he’s bitten his lip in what must be excitement. 

“I taught you some basics about boxing,” Otabek supplies, and a grin blossoms on Yuri’s face.

“Barely,” Yuri says. “You were a pretty shitty teacher.”

“I’d only been doing it for like, seven months at the time,” Otabek complains, but a stubborn smile has creeped up onto the corners of his lips. “I’ve got more experience now.”

“Oh yeah?” Yuri asks, and it sounds like a challenge. He raises an eyebrow. “Show me then.”

Otabek huffs out a laugh. He clenches his fists, and feels the sting of his healing scabs. 

“Okay,” Otabek says, and jumps up from his swing. 

“Fuck yes,” Yuri says, just under his breath, and follows suit. 

They spend another few hours circling each other around the sandpit in front of the swings, until the sky starts to brighten around them. It feels like no time at all to Otabek, except once he’s taught Yuri some basic grappling moves, he gets dropped by Yuri’s foot around his ankle and a shove to the shoulder, and Otabek finds he can’t quite pick himself up again. 

“Okay, wait,” Otabek pleads, staring up at the sky. 

He wonders when it got so light out. But now that he’s gotten a handful of seconds horizontal, his body decides to remind him he’s spent the last 20 hours on a plane, and all the sore places on his body from his boxing match throb painfully in time to his heartbeat. Otabek runs a hand over his eyes, and it’s like a spell has been broken; his eyelids suddenly feel heavy as lead, and when he blinks, it feels almost impossible to open them again.

He’s just thinking that he’ll rest his eyes for just a moment, when he hears a slight thump beside him, and hears Yuri’s breath somewhere by his head.

“I’ll say that round went to me,” Yuri says, and at least he sounds out of breath too.

“Maybe,” Otabek concedes, and when he opens his eyes and turns his head, he sees Yuri’s sprawled out on the sand beside him, his head cradled in his hands as he lay on his back. 

He closes his eyes, and feels the familiar pull of sleep start to creep up along the edges of his mind, and then, almost simultaneously, Otabek and Yuri’s cell phones start blaring. Rada’s name on his screen is ominous and terrible; he can practically hear her angry voice already.

“Shit,” they say, almost as one, and when Otabek meets his eyes again, they both burst out laughing.

So they rush back to the hotel, neither of them bothering to answer their phones. Otabek’s entire body feels like it’s about to fall apart, but when Yuri smiles at him in the elevator to their rooms, Otabek can’t seem to mind. 

“I’ll see you in a couple of days,” Yuri says when the doors open on the sixth floor. 

“Yeah,” Otabek says. “Good luck. You’re gonna need it.”

“You wish, Altin!” Yuri says with a grin as the elevator doors slide closed. 

*  
Rada is waiting for him when he opens the door to his hotel room, and it’s another long, grueling hour of her yelling and pretending to be worried before he’s finally able to collapse into sleep. 

*

Not even six hours later, grainy photos of their night time escapades make it online. Yuri sends him a text that’s all exclamation points and a link to a website he’s pretty sure will give his phone a virus but clicks on it anyway. Otabek stares at the series of grainy photographs: one of them is from when Otabek forced them to do warm-ups, so it catches Yuri mid-jump while Otabek is on the ground doing push ups. The next is when they’re sparring; they’re little more than a singular smudge on the ground. Otabek remembers the breath of laughter that Yuri huffed into his ear, but in this photo nothing of that remains. The last is of Yuri aiming a punch right for Otabek’s face. He remembers that it was light-hearted, with a playful jibe about hitting him in vulnerable places. The website is entirely in Russian, and Otabek’s reading comprehension of Russian isn’t as good as he’d like, so he struggles to make out what the title is saying. 

He stares at that last photo for probably longer than is necessary; at the long line that starts at Yuri’s back foot and extends through his body up to the pop of pale skin that is his fist. He stares at the yellow shock of Yuri’s hair until a text message pops up from the boy in question. 

_PEOPLE THINK I GAVE YOU THAT BLACK EYE OMG_

“Oh,” Otabek says, and then nearly drops his phone when it starts vibrating with an incoming call. 

“It is definitely too early for this,” Otabek says into his phone receiver upon answering it, to which Jean doesn’t even have the decency to apologize. 

“I wouldn’t have to call if you weren’t up all night fighting,” Jean says very unreasonably, Otabek thinks. 

“You know that’s not what happened,” Otabek replies. 

“So you say,” is Jean’s cryptic response. “All I know is that my best friend abandons me to Japan, and the next thing I know I have to find out from the Senior’s League Group Chat that you and Yuri have been fighting.”

There are several parts to that sentence that make no sense to Otabek, so he decides to ignore them all for the good of his sanity. 

“If you wanted to hang out, you could have asked,” he says instead, and the embarrassed sounding silence on the other end of the line speaks volumes. 

“Why do you think I called, Otabek?”

So Otabek neatly dodges most of the reporters (who do, in fact, think that Yuri’s given him that black eye; Otabek has to sidestep so many people who want to know if he’s pressing charges, My God) and meets Jean at just after 11 o’clock in the morning out behind the hotel. Otabek feels a little like what he expects a hangover would feel like, and he knows it shows when Jean looks up and grimaces expansively. 

“Remember what Leo says about face journeys,” Otabek says lightly and starts walking in a random direction. 

Jean laughs a little, falling into step beside him. The silence between them is comfortable, born out of years of an easy friendship. Not for the first time, Otabek wonders what would have happened if his life had gone a little different, if he hadn’t made friends with such a perplexing boy so many years ago. He’s grateful for Jean in his life, even if he ends up ruining the moment by grinning his most cock-sure grin and--as slyly as humanly possible--saying:

“So what’s up between you and Russia’s Punk Fairy?” 

“Nothing. “

“Right,” Jean says, clearly disbelieving. “Otabek, we both know you wouldn’t actually fight the kid. Not the way everyone is thinking you would. So what gives? Were you actually teaching him some fighting techniques?”

“No,” Otabek lies. He shrugs. “Maybe? He wanted to hang out, and then. I just thought that it would be nice.”

“Not the best first date, as far as those go,” Jean answers lightly. 

“Oh my God,” Otabek breathes. “Have you been talking to Rada again?”

“We agreed we both need spies.” Jean stops abruptly and turns his pleading eyes onto Otabek. He’s always been especially susceptible to Jean’s stupid puppy dog eyes. “Why wouldn’t you tell your _best friend in the whole wide world_ that you’re in love? Hmm?”

Otabek panics a little at the ‘l’ word thrown around so haphazardly. He makes a giant waving motion with his hands, which at least gets the puppy eyes off Jean’s face. But it does bring back the smirk which is, objectively, worse. 

“Don’t call him that,” Otabek grits out. “It’s not like that.”

“Otabek, in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve liked exactly zero people. What makes this kid so special?”

“Everything.” 

Otabek says it without thinking, and then violently regrets opening his mouth. But that is the crux of it, really. There’s always been something that’s drawn Otabek to him, even if it’s only recently been a--a--different kind of thing than simple friendship. The look on Jean’s face is… Complicated. Otabek doesn’t have the emotional faculties at sixteen to decode the expression on his best friend’s face, and so instead he says:

“You told me once that he wasn’t going to take my place as your best friend,” Jean says carefully. “I think that’s true. I also think that there’s something more there than a normal, long distance friendship.”

The serious look on Jean’s face is beginning to freak Otabek out now. He runs a hand through his hair and tries to get his heartbeat under control. 

“Can we please talk about anything else?” 

“Yes, let's,” Jean says faintly, and after a moment, rallies again. “Let’s talk about me! Otabek, I’ve met someone. It’s love at first sight.”

Which prompts a forty minute long talk about a young girl named Isabella that Jean literally ran into as he was crossing the street in Canada three weeks ago. She’s only a few months older than Jean, but she’s skipped sophomore year and is already looking into colleges. She wants to go to law school. She has hair like a curtain of black velvet (Jean’s metaphor), and lips as red as blood. 

(Obviously this was stolen from Snow White, because as he says it, Jean sighs dramatically and whispers “Bring me your heart, my dear Snow White,” and Otabek is so embarrassed by him that he threatens to stuff Jean into the nearest trash can where he belongs. 

“You wound me, Otabek,” Jean says, and his eyes honestly actually start to fill with tears, and so Otabek has a moment where he channels Yuri Plisetsky and actually does stuff Jean into a trashcan by the park. 

Jean, the bastard, doesn’t even have the decency to be chagrined. He takes a selfie in the garbage and captions it _finally home where I belong #gpf #goldhereicome #fukuoka_ when he posts it to Instagram.

Otabek doesn’t even know why they’re friends.)

*

The Junior’s GPF turns out to be a tedious affair. He should have taken Leo’s advice, or listened to Jean’s pleas, or let himself be bullied by Rada and Kelebek to join the senior’s division last year. The only real competition this year is Yuri, although Guang Hong Ji is also there. Otabek remembers him putting up a fight last year, and was looking forward to competing against him as well. He’s taken out of the competition early, though, when he lands wrong on a salchow and flubs his way through the second half of his short program on what looks like an injured ankle. 

Really, the most interesting thing to happen to the Junior’s GPF is Yuri and Otabek’s explosive rivalry. Otabek’s lucky that his eye has healed some, and that the mostly cosmetic bruising is slowly turning a pasty green. It makes it easy to explain how he’d already had the black eye before their “fight.” 

That comment, however, ends up biting him in the butt, because he ends up spending another thirty minutes talking to those pesky reporters about how he boxes, yes really. Yes, instead of ballet, because he’s never been crazy about dancing, and anyway it makes him a unique skater. And that yes, he’s sure he did not get his black eye from fighting with Yuri Plisetsky before the GPF. 

Yuri sends him laughing emojis throughout the whole ordeal. 

Mostly, however, they avoid each other. Rada absolutely forbade Otabek from pulling any more stunts like that, and even threatened to take away his next birthday present if he so much as said a lukewarm good luck to the other boy. 

“I know what Mama and Dad are getting you,” she whispers dangerously, her eyes narrowed. “Trust me. You do not want me to take it instead.” 

So they both have to make due with heckling each other via passive aggressive (Otabek) and outright aggressive (Yuri) statements to the press. He thinks he’d have more fun if he was allowed to actually say more than two words to Yuri. 

Yuri wins the gold that year by exactly one and a half points, despite taking out all of his illegal quads. Otabek stares at his silver medal for so long that his eyes start to water. He thinks about the under-rotated triple axel at the end of his free skate and nearly burns with frustration. He honestly believes that that one mistake is the only reason Yuri is standing in the center spot today. But when he turns to glare at Yuri, the boy’s grin is so blinding that for a second he forgets his own anger. 

They are friends, after all. Otabek is allowed to be proud of him, even if it is only in his own head. 

The pictures that make the rounds however, are the ones that have Otabek scowling in the background as Yuri proudly holds up his gold. Yuri sends him every one that’s posted online that night, in twenty minute intervals to ensure he doesn’t get a wink of sleep.

 _let’s make a big scene at the banquet tomorrow y/n_ Yuri texts him sometime after midnight.

Otabek sends him a thumbs up emoji, and considers the fact that Yuri is probably already planning the argument they’ll have. Otabek hopes he gets to throw a few punches.

*

They do not end up making a scene at the GPF banquet that year. This is because Katsuki Yuuri, who Otabek did not get to see compete at seniors this year, gets spectacularly drunk and steals the spotlight from Yuri Plisetsky. Otabek thinks their dance-off is outrageously funny and even gets video evidence to blackmail them with later. He also thinks the tango Katsuki does with five-time gold medalist Viktor Nikiforov is pretty cute, considering the awestruck look on Nikiforov’s face, and the way they both burst into laughter like they have not a care in the world.

And then someone pulls a stripper pole out of absolutely nowhere, and Otabek spends the rest of the night sipping water and avoiding eye contact with everyone. He never gets to say more than a handful of words to Yuri that night, and he hurries to his room as soon as polite society would allow. 

It’s probably the strangest end to a competitive season Otabek has ever had, truth be told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: we finally get to the events of the show (more or less) with the added bonus of just what the heck Otabek did during that time!
> 
> Find me on tumblr @alpha-hydra! I mostly shitpost, but I will answer anon asks!

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr @alpha-hydra where I mostly shitpost and reblog dog videos.


End file.
